Royal Albert Hall
David Nice
A packed Albert Hall told an instructive story: programme Holst’s The Planets at the Proms and you can dare to do anything in the first half. Besides, though it will be a red letter day when we don’t have to put “women” in front of “conductors”, the Marin Alsop Last Night effect may have kindled interest in Susanna Mälkki, top of a still too-small list from the two concerts I’ve heard her give with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Mälkki seems just as authoritative in mainstream romantic and 20th century scores as she is in thornier so-called contemporary music (she spent seven years with Ensemble Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After four years, 55 cities in 22 countries and an award-winning recording, Leif Ove Andsnes’s Beethoven journey came to an end last night in an emotionally charged evening at the Royal Albert Hall. And in a delightful light-hearted moment after all the serious music making was done, Andsnes finished the concert vigorously playing the tambourine in an orchestral encore.The highlight of the evening was, perhaps unexpectedly, the Second Piano Concerto, which ended the first half. Much revised and meddled with by Beethoven over nearly 15 years, this is the sunniest of the concertos. It was Read more ...
David Nice
Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don’t need much. Too much ruined English National Opera’s recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptation of Grange Park Opera’s summer crowd-pleaser it sent the voices ricocheting around the Albert Hall, making mush of the words and stridency of the few belt-it-out moments. It also made it hard to assess what seemed like a resourceful staging of a baggy-monster musical with four or five great songs, no masterpiece of musical theatre (unlike My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof’s near-contemporary).The idea of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
So to the second leg of Leif Ove Andsnes's journey through the Beethoven concertos, and a distressingly underpopulated Royal Albert Hall. Perhaps the punters were put off by the wintry weather, or perhaps by the dread names of Schoenberg and Stravinsky on the bill. Either way, it is shocking that Andsnes’s wonderful playing should have been to anything other than a full house.Far from being frightening, the Stravinsky that opened the programme – the “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto – is completely charming and was played with appropriate fleetness and élan. It is easier to listen to than to play, Read more ...
David Nice
Beethoven’s piano concertos have been no strangers to any Proms season. Only five years ago our own Paul Lewis embarked on a cycle not so very far, in terms of elegance and stylishness, from that of the present pianist-in-residence, Leif Ove Andsnes. Where Lewis proved a phenomenal trill-master, Andsnes’ runs and flights make his own approach especially rich and rare. The difference is that the current Odysseus reaches the Ithaca of the Royal Albert Hall after four years touring with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, a uniquely responsive and intuitive band which he’s directing/conducting from Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This Prom was the final concert of Andris Nelsons's remarkable seven-year spell as principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Their Prom showed the astonishing level of responsiveness and flexibility which he and they have achieved together, over the course of more than 300 concerts.There had been more elaborate farewells and formalities last month at Symphony Hall in Birmingham, with performances of Mahler's Third Symphony, the speeches and all that. For this final coda, Nelsons took a supporting role. He accepted all the applause at the end of the concert from within Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
So it begins. Thousands of expectant audience members in a sweltering Albert Hall – heave ho! – riotous applause for the leader as he tunes the orchestra. A few more visits and all this will seem normal again, but it’s a culture shock to be thrown straight back in on the first night.The First Night of the Proms has to tick many boxes, as does the Last Night, and in both cases the result is usually a very long evening. The season’s themes were presented – anniversary celebrations for Nielsen and Sibelius, as well as a focus on Mozart piano concertos – and we were also treated to a new work and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
You might think that the carefree, gleeful melodies of sunny Californian surf-rock giants The Beach Boys would render them immune to the kind of egotistical wedge-driving that sunders most rock groups eventually. You would, of course, be wrong. Shortly after the band’s 50th-anniversary world tour in 2012, Mike Love, who owns the band’s name, took it away for his own version of the Beach Boys, leaving founder (and widely acknowledged musical genius) Brian Wilson and Al Jardine behind. Rumours, which will receive a thorough airing in the next year when first Wilson, then Love, publish their Read more ...
theartsdesk
Hottest tickets for seats at the Proms have probably all gone already. Yet the beauty of it is that so long as you start queueing early enough you can always get to hear the greatest, or rather the most popular, artists, for £5 in the Arena which is of course easily the best place to be acoustically in the notoriously unpredictable Royal Albert Hall. And don’t say you’re too old to stand: a 91-year-old student of mine – her name, Grace Payne, needs celebrating – has been doing it, with a few breaks overseas, since 1947, and she’ll be there again this summer.First reactions to the Read more ...
David Nice
Offshoots of the Venezuelan El Sistema’s worldwide dissemination as well as other youth and music projects continued to bloom and grow in 2014. The morning after what was the orchestral concert of the year for many who caught it, Alexandra Coghlan (see below) and myself included, players of the European Union Youth Orchestra reconvened in the Albert Hall to workshop three classics with musicians from nine British youth orchestras and London schools.How proud the EUYO's founding music director Claudio Abbado would have been of this ongoing good work (he died, as if we could forget, this year Read more ...
David Nice
When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been of such a vintage that I couldn’t possibly choose the best out of six fully-staged productions – three of them from our only native director of genius, Richard Jones, who as one of his favourite singers, Susan Bullock, put it to me, deserves every gong going – and one concert performance.Fortunately I didn’t need to lean too hard on my Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This feelgood programme hit all the buttons with almost unerring precision, as we followed Gareth Malone's project to prepare a military wives choir for a special prom, commemorating the World War One centenary on 3 August 2014. On the way we witnessed the joys of singing, the therapeutic value of music, and the virtues of hard work, mutual support and bonding.However, most of us might harbour a natural suspicion and even an uneasy cynicism about everybody’s wonderful niceness, generosity, kindness and supportiveness. Not a meow was to be heard from any of the women, and conductor Gareth of Read more ...