BBC Proms 2008 (the unofficial Blog)

AND NOW FOR 2010. . .

2010-04-17T20:54:00.003+01:00

In case people are still dropping by, sorry I couldn't do a blog last year. Although I did get to some concerts, and listened to others at home, I wasn't very well last year, and couldn't handle the hours involved in writing and publishing reviews several times a week.

However, I'm (hopefully!) feeling a bit more capable this year, and if I think I can manage it, I'll post a new Proms 2010 blog address here in May.

Thanks to all those who left comments and emailed their appreciation. Glad to know all that effort wasn't entirely wasted!

When the Fat Lady Sings . . .

2008-09-15T04:05:00.003+01:00

. . .it's all over. So the Proms Season of 2008 is over and done with. Except, for this blog it isn't; while Zeina and I couldn't review every prom as it happened, I did record many more than we had time to write about. So, since the BBC often repeats many Proms concerts in the autumn and winter (watch the Radio 3 schedules) I'll gradually post more reviews on this blog over the coming weeks. So keep in touch.

Thanks to all those who kept up.

Prom 72: Perahia Sans Pareil

2008-09-10T18:42:00.002+01:00

Listening to Murray Perahia performing Mozart’s Concerto No. 24 felt like a privilege. Never had I felt before so privy to a pianist’s deepest feelings as I had done last night.

He was supported most ably by the stalwart Chicago SO under the experienced baton of Bernard Haitink. As a matter of fact, the sound reminded me of those magic recordings of the late sixties and early seventies which filled me with passion for the standard Viennese repertoire.

But Perahia was the man of the first half. His touch was so light, his instrument sounded almost like a fortepiano. I cannot liken it to lace because that might indicate fragility. This was a performance which seemed both to look forward to Beethoven and back to an 18th century salon while marking the genius of this remarkable composer.

Only an artist of Perahia’s sensitivity could bring this dichotomy and individuality together into a coherent whole to plumb a depth of emotion I associate with Beethoven while retaining that deft touch which is so classical in style.

Yet this was not the whole picture. To this achievement, he added something much more difficult to measure—which I can only describe as lifelong experience.

I do not mean the ease he had with the music which he knew inside out. This was so absolute you felt he could play the notes in reverse, improvise with them or even almost re-compose the whole concerto: I mean the sum total of the little bits of life which make the man.

I believe we were benefiting from decades of reading, absorbing, inhaling and ingesting Mozart.

We were privileged not only by an elegant performance but one imbued with a deep understanding of the emotional impact of human experience.

(Zeina Trewin)

RAH Live

Prom 72: Mozart, Piano Concerto No24 in C Major; Murray Perahia (pno). Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Bernard Haitink

(Apologies: there was supposed to be an accompanying pic, but Blogger simply wouldn't let me upload one today, and I gave up on it.)

False Alarm

2008-09-07T09:01:00.002+01:00

I may have brought it on myself, writing a little while ago that it was odd how two critics could agree about the general tenor of a performance, but reach entirely opposite conclusions.

That’s what happened to me about Prom 68’s Firebird. I found it extremely disappointing; my colleague thought it the cleanest and clearest exposition she had heard. In some respects, I would have to say that was true, but I thought the early tempi were very slow and too measured, overall it was somewhat timid, and only caught fire very late. I couldn't imagine the Ballet Russe dancing to it at all; one of the very few times I've thought I was hearing a "concert performance" of a ballet.

In fact, I wondered if that night Vladimir Jurovsky had been too conscious of the current chilly relationship between Britain and Russia after the scattering of polonium in coffee bars and football stadia all over London, and was therefore anxious for this concert not to sound too “Russian”. Certainly the LPO could hardly have been accused of that last Friday night.

I cannot recall any Rimsky sounding more as though it might have been composed by some Siamese twinning of Ravel and Debussy than the “Kaschey the Immortal” did. Nor anything more like a Grimm fairytale bowdlerised into a happy-ending bedtime story for small children susceptible to nightmares.

Where on earth was the Gothic horror of the castle crenellated with skulls? If I hadn’t had the libretto and notes in front of me, I would never have guessed, and even then, simply found it unimaginable. Where was the tortured princess? where the fear of Kaschey losing his immortality? Nowhere that I could hear. Even what I have to assume should be a fearsome window-rattling (or at least skull-rattling) storm sounded to me only like a small squall on a sheltered inland lake.

And, frankly, though I had had great hopes of the singers, they were mostly misplaced. The tenor, though of remarkable portliness (he had what used to be called ‘a corporation’ of some immensity) was colourless; Tatiana Monogarova was simply weak; and I cannot really convince myself that either Paul Baransky (Korolevich) or Mikhail Peterenko (The Storm Knight) had much of a grasp of the characters they were singing. It was only Elena Manistina as Kascheyevna that did, and she was at least applauded strongly in consequence.

It all showed, I think, the difficulty of performing something as downright odd as —and really rather dramatically intractable—Kaschey without giving it a lot of serious thought and consideration. Without that, as tonight, a rather poor composition (as I’d have to term it from what I heard, not having come across it before) slithers down the critical scale from second-rate to near worthless, and I’m sure much more could have been made of it.

As I thought of the Firebird which I felt was too Stravinsky-as-French-native too . However, I have to admit that by then I was suffering rather badly from an uncomfortable side effect of the painkillers I’d had to take, and so I think I’ll listen to the repeat on its own later to see whether I was being unnecessarily harsh. All the same, I’ve heard both the LPO and Jurovsky sound much better than this. Maybe my expectations were just too high.

(Late note: I listened again to the R3 repeat, and I must say that—allowing for my criticism of the singers above—it did sound somewhat more dramatic than it did to either of us in the RAH; my colleague agreed. I recorded the Firebird, so I may come back to that.)

RAH Live

Prom 68: Rimsky-Korsakov (Katschey the Immortal); Stravinsky (Firebird); LPO, Vladimir Jurovsky.

Prom 64: Yin, Yang, and Chaos Theory

2008-09-04T15:59:00.005+01:00

I am a newcomer to Messaien but if I had to pick an exponent of the Turangalila Symphony, I couldn’t have chosen a worthier or better champion than Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil.

It is a large abstract piece but with a concrete core and an earth-bound effect. It is also an amazing exercise in juxtaposition: yin vs. yen; man vs. woman; thrust vs. pull; tenderness vs. passion.

This is a symphony of duelling duos intertwining then de-coupling with an energy worthy of a Picasso, though unlike Picasso, the 'Joie' (which recurs often in the notes)
is personified in the union between man and woman, something you don’t often see in his pictures.

The fifth section is in the form of a ballet worthy of a Gene Kelly musical as inflated and daring but equally fun and tongue-in-cheek until something very disruptive mischievously breaks it up creating a happy chaotic scampering, bobbing and clamouring effect.

Is sexual desire the mischievous child/clown and the dance the deeper layer of love? Christmas is here at the end as an eruption of utter joy pushes the orchestra louder than I ever heard an orchestra play at the RAH (NY Phil, eat your heart out).

Then follows the garden where lovers sleep yawning on a lazy post-coital afternoon, finishing with the chimes of times passing.

This is a very pictorial music once you’ve grasped the main theme (thanks to the programme notes). For chaos returns more destructive, random and cruel, but not entirely evil, just majestic and serendipitous.

The duality and battle of extremes fill the second half of the symphony as it surges ever louder into melody chopped and suppressed by chaotic strings (piano excellently played by Pierre-Laurent Aimard) and reaches a level of almost pagan awe which is remarkable considering Messaien was such a committed Catholic to the last. As if his love of woman and his Gallic rejoicing in the beauty of sex were not in conflict with his more religious beliefs. Rather refreshing!

This is a remarkably orchestrated giant of a symphony with a huge message of the wonder of human love in its heart, but it was also made accessible by lucid and clear interpretation for which a novice such as I am cheerfully grateful.

(Zeina Trewin)

RAH Live

Prom 64: Messaien: Turangalila Symphony; Berlin Philharmonic; Pierre-Laurent Aimard (pno); Tristan Murial (ondes martinot).

When is an Encore not an Encore?

2008-09-02T09:59:00.003+01:00

I've just read (in the one and only review of it on the R3 'Review' pages) that the "clapping and stamping of the audience" at the NYPO's Prom 58 "encouraged three encores".

It didn't. I hated that concert—as you've read below—and left as soon as the Tchaikovsky was finished, to be told by two stewards outside the hall itself, just as the first encore started, that I couldn't use a lift (which I need, because I'm crippled) until after the third encore. They knew what they were going to be, and the approximate timings. I'd actually overheard two during the interval talking about a kind of "extra time" but I didn't grasp the significance.

I'm not naive enough to think conductors don't often have "one they prepared earlier" but it seems on this occasion at least, the "encores" were really part of the concert and were irrelevant to the audience's reaction. And irrelevant as to whether they were going to be continually enthusiastic having heard one encore or two . . .

It seems to me, if not disingenuous, to border on the dishonest, particularly for the audience outside the hall itself, listening to radio or iPlayer, who might on some occasions not be able to get a true impression of the audience's reaction. Might even be misled, thinking "Well, it got three encores, so it must have been better than I thought."

It's far from unknown for the hall to be only half-full, especially for a late night Prom, and yet for the audience to be far more enthusastic than the volume of applause might appear if you aren't there. Conversely, it's also not unknown for claques to make a great noise, and give the impression they are the majority of the audience when they are not. Listeners might well be misled as to why the performers gave an encore in the first, and none in the second.

I wonder now how many other "encores" this season were going to be played anyway, regardless of the degree of enthusiasm or appreciation from the audience? What happened to the notion of spontaneity? Or even the idea that encores are not always necessary, or wanted? Or sometimes inappropriate?

I have known conductors adamantly refuse a Proms audience that was obviously eager for one, and though we've sometimes felt a little disappointed—because it's a way of saying "we liked that so much we really don't want to see you go"— it's something one must accept. It is not, Mr Maazel and members of the New York Philharmonic, an inalienable right under the American Constitution. And since we—not having a written constitution—would have to rely on the Human Rights Act, for your informatioon it's not in that, either.

I suppose the NYPO is going to do exactly the same as it continues its tour, and mislead even more. This isn't a reaction to an audience's appreciation: it's just building an image of popularity—advertising, to be blunt—for an audience and perhaps critics who don't know it was all pre-arranged.

I'm tempted now to ask quietly how many encores there will be, what they are, and how long they will last when I go in to my next Prom.

(That will be Rattle, the Berlin and the Turangalila tonight, by the way; we'll try to get the review up on Wednesday, but I'm afraid—because I had to struggle down the damn stairs last Friday—I'm a bit fragile and more than usually crippled and in pain this week . . .)

The Mother of all shows . . .

2008-08-30T01:01:00.006+01:00

There are times when I wonder what on earth comes over Prommers, why they will applaud and stamp over a performance I think was barely worth a polite tapping of fingers against palms.

Tonight's Prom 58 (New York Philharmonic/Maazel) was one of those. My colleague on this blog suggested I ought to warn you in advance that I could not share their enthusiasm for Mother Goose, The Miraculous Mandarin or Tchaikovsky's 4th.

I left before the encores (all three pre-arranged: the Albert Hall stewards knew there were going to be three, and the timings, by the way) and, if I could have done so inconspicuously, would have before the start of the second movement of the Tchaikovsky.

All three performances were pieces of showmanship, and in my view (obviously not shared by a rather large proportion of the audience) were travesties of the music they are supposed to be. The Mother Goose, was simply flat-footed, splayed out in a soft glow of self-congratulatory playing that simply washed over the Albert Hall like Pears coal-tar soap; the Miraculous Mandarin a jagged unkempt mess that sounded as though it was some mash-up of three different SUV's being run off a Detroit car production line without any quality controllers, and the best that I would want to say of the Tchaikovsky was that it was often VERY LOUD. It ended like a high-speed train wreck.

When I see three-quarters of the orchestra on stage more than twenty minutes before the performance is due to start, and I realise that they are not tuning, but apparently rehearsing whole stretches of the programme to come (and as separate sections, at that) cynical journo that I am, I wonder why? It's not something I recall ever having witnessed before, and a horrible noise it was too.

I think I found the answer in the performances, because, assuming all three were Maazel's conception, then the members had to play in a manner that could hardly be called natural. Unless, of course, they had had too little rehearsal time in the morning.

It's incumbent on me, I suppose, to explain more precisely why I thought the Ravel was pitiful, the Bartok grotesque and the Tchaikovsky, well, 'gross'. In other words, the very tricks, shallow showmanship and idiosyncracies that so amused me the night before in the Gershwin, applied to tonight's programme, particularly in the Bartok, I loathed.

I'll fill you in, I suppose. Just give me a little time to cool down. And hire a bodyguard . . .

RAH Live

Prom 58: Ravel (Mother Goose); Bartok (The Miraculous Mandarin); Tchaikovsky (Symphony No 4); Lorin Maazel, New York Philharmonic.

Prom 57: Finger lickin’ good, Jerry

2008-08-28T23:09:00.005+01:00

There are piano concertos and piano concertos, and Gershwin's in F Major is neither, really; at least he himself called it a “New York concerto” which is rather better.

It is pretty well impossible, to be honest, to take it at all seriously otherwise. It’s a conglomeration of bits of other Gershwin with a piano obbligato, and that’s it. You pick out the bits from Porgy and Bess, American in Paris, Strike up the Band . . .

That’s not to say it can’t be great fun to listen to: and Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the New York Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel played it like a soundtrack to a Tom and Jerry epic: rousing and glorious, slyly sentimental, and a little unashamed closing-title weepiness before it crashed out in a glorious big-band wah-wah free for all.

In the first movement, it’s a grand bash for piano and orchestra, and Thibaudet certainly gave the piano a hammering. It was played as a bit of a joke, over-the-top, all Barnum and Bailey, just as it needs to be. The percussion certainly fizzed and thumped, with some great knock-out punches, although the strings did seem to me to sound rather thick in texture.

This isn’t really Gershwin 'classicising' jazz (or ‘jazzifying classical’) the way I’ve heard it played (both ways round) in the past; it’s Gershwin having heard it, been aware of it (I’d hesitate to say was ‘involved’ in it) and no more. But for it to work, the performers have to feel some involvement in the atmosphere of it, and both soloist and orchestra obviously did.

The second movement piano was nicely cool, almost post-modernist to begin with; this was Porgy, a little sad, a little reflective. A man who coulda been a contender. A piano that had been, and a heavyweight at that.

And thus complemented by pure, unashamed orchestral teary-eyed sentimentality. A perfect contrast with the roaring rhythms that followed: inescapably reminding you of those huge American steam engines with, seemingly, a dozen drive wheels either side, great long tenders and an enormous spotlight on the front driving a beam through the night before great trailing clouds of steam.

Maazel had, apparently, asked for slower tempos in rehearsal, but then decided the faster ones of his (very talented, particularly the expressive force of the trumpeter) soloists were better. It was a good call. It made him another conductor of 78 going on 18 for the night . .

So Prokofiev said it was “a succession of 32-bar choruses”; more, tonight, really, a succession of chorus girls, perhaps; and Diaghilev said it was “good jazz but bad Liszt.” Thibaudet certainly played it like Liszt (but not as though it was written by him) in a maddish mood. I don’t care if it’s not great music. I loved it. ‘Finger lickin’ good.’ Hey, man?

R3 Relay

Gershwin: Piano Concerto in F Major; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, New York Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel.

Prom 51: Passion with a Mission

2008-08-28T19:18:00.007+01:00

There was something uncomfortable about the first 10 to 15 minutes of Gardiner’s St John’s Passion as though neither orchestra nor alto and soprano could control their tone.

Early instrument ensembles, in my experience, often seem to start shaky as though they need a little more use and room temperature to bed down or at least respond with more immediacy to their players’ will. I’d not met it with voices before. Perhaps it was empathy!

For empathy was key to the performance as orchestra and particularly chorus were one with their conductor.

The Hall was full which is always a good cushion to back on when your musical legs are about to give way. Prommers are patient and very understanding. So, notwithstanding the alto’s under-performance in his first aria and the soprano’s distraction in hers, we winced and waited for the dust to settle. The good news is that it did. Magnificently!

Marc Padmore’s tenor voice was so utterly pure and high, it soared clean and filled the hall with melancholia. The tale he was telling was tragic and he expressed that tragedy with the emphasis it deserved.

The orchestra was almost too good for some of its soloists (bar Padmore). It is a brilliant assembly of performers with a ruthless driver uncompromisingly reaching towards an understanding of the passion according to St Gardiner.

As the instruments warmed up so too the voices and synergy was complete. Jesus spat the German consonants with poignancy to denounce injustice; the chorus rose louder as the evening progressed, alternating between its 2 role of nemesis and catharsis. Nasty, cruel and superbly violent in the crowd scenes particularly where the jews were baying for Jesus’ blood on the one hand and gentle soft almost humble in the “lesson” part of their role.

The road to redemption is in the understanding of the morality of the tale not so much the miracle of it, but what it meant to achieve.

The chorus made that distinction abundantly clear.

Then came one of the unexpected enchantments of the evening: the second tenor in the aria “Erwage, wie sein...” with a voice which seemed to issue from the back of his throat with guttural long sustained notes punctuated by those expressive German consonants.

By then Gardiner’s reading was becoming clear to his audience. This was going to be a piece of patience and slowness where contemplation is in order and rushing only allowed in the arias and the chorus as it reached a frenzied fury of sound and chilled beauty in the one-word musical line “Kreuzige!” "Crucify!"

Our journey of discovery of sound effectiveness was now at its climax as Gardiner continued his lesson in timing and dramatic control where our patience throughout the long series of uneventful pieces (which might have induced stupor) was rewarded with bravura of voice and instrument.

The alto and soprano were now note perfect, sure of themselves, their voice pairing exquisitely with their alloted solo instrument; cello for the alto, oboe for the soprano and chorus for the bass, in slow contemplative heightened lyricism. A supreme reflection on the events which had been related to us.

The last chorus rippled its chorale like pearls of water, once again soft and slow but concluded in prayer, a tone reminiscent of a church congregation.

This was a thoughtful, intelligent and well-expressed interpretation by a band of assured performers working together in a complex network and controlling them with unflinching conviction, John Elliot Gardiner reading his lesson to us with uncompromising integrity. This was Lutheran Bach whose raison d’être was to guide his listener to a state of grace, in humility and awe at the tragedy of the story of the crucifixion. Even a non-believer such as I could not help but be inspired!

(Zeina Trewin)

RAH Live

Bach: St John Passion; Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, cond. John Eliot Gardiner

Four more years! (Oh, and Proms 50, 51 and 52.) It's cool . . .

2008-08-25T01:16:00.010+01:00

Of Proms, and then the Olympics . . .they're ours now! That handover segment—new version of the national anthem (played by the LSO) . . . a new 'Whole Lotta Love' (!) . . . . Cool or what?

Prom reviews of 50, 51 and 52 coming up soon. I spent all afternoon and the evening at the RAH, but see the 'Carnival' sidebar; you'll have to bear with us. I only got home at midnight, as did my colleague Zeina who's doing the St John Passion and who lives in the Carnival zone, too.

It's nearly 2am and the vultures are still coming round collecting the rubbish those 2 million visitors left behind, the street sweeping machines are trundling up and down spraying the streets and the pavements, somebody is playing jazz trumpet solos in the street opposite my flat (quite well, actually) but I want to go to sleep before it all starts at 10 am again!

Simon Preston did a really challenging and fascinating Bach organ recital, played so sensitively at times you could have almost believed that huge organ had the heart of a harpsichord; and Gardiner had a very different take on the Passion too, and I thought a very thoughtful, cleverly constructed one. Jian Wang was very technically virtuosic in the Cello Suites, even if No 1 was a bit too clever at first . . .

There are, I wish some of the audience would understand, no medals awarded for being the first to applaud. And grasp that when the conductor keeps his left hand raised, as Gardiner did this afternoon, the race does not start until it is down by his side. Pity they can't be disqualified for jumping the gun.

Prom 46: A wide-awake beauty

2008-08-22T19:54:00.003+01:00

Prom 46’s Sleeping Beauty with the LSO and Gerghiev was a pure feat of theatre. By the end of Act 3, caught up in the tale, my ‘suspension of disbelief’ was absolute.

No smoochie soft-centres or artificial sweeteners where you least expect it. Gerghiev informed it with ‘Russian’ emotionality; occasionally like a grand gesture that almost slapped you across the face. And so tight! The performance was superbly controlled, always with an undercurrent of the darkly threatening which lifted only in Act 3. Shakespeare would have understood that. It was a ‘Winter’s Tale’.

Gerghiev led us through his theatrical reading as a dance of air and light. Even the ‘wicked’ witch Carabosse was no ugly hag; she hovered, light and lethal in the Finale of the first part of Act 1, and our Aurora was sometimes bird, sometimes butterfly. The LSO read his energy and his gestures with exact interpretative ability.

Act 3 (performed complete for the first time at the Proms) was an extended Hollywood happy ending, an essential release, well deserved after the darkness of the foregoing acts. And the evocation of the fairy-tale characters (not just the splendid cat, but Red Riding Hood faced with the Wolf) absolutely true to Perrault.

We do need to indulge once in a while in escapism, joy and laughter, never forgetting that this Master of Ceremonies is Russian to the soul by concluding this three hours of escapism with a hymn to darkness and majesty.

I will carry away with me a sense of operatic, grand, display of Russian sentiment tempered by a cool, accurate, restrained intellect, almost metaphysical.

(Zeina Trewin.)

RAH Live Prom 46: Tchaikovsky: Sleeping Beauty; LSO/Gerghiev

Don't just stand there . . .

2008-08-22T18:09:00.002+01:00

. . .stand up for something!

' The world-renowned conductor Valery Gergiev, himself an Ossetian, gave a concert in the devastated South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali with his home orchestra, the Mariinsky of St Petersburg.

Gergiev, who is also principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, performed a requiem of Russian music for a city he compared in a speech to Stalingrad.

As the orchestra performed with South Ossetia's shattered parliament building as a backdrop, soldiers and civilians listened side by side.

Gergiev told his audience - and the world - that Georgia, not Russia had been the aggressor. "We know how much people suffered," he said in English.

"We know how much these children suffered, old people. Let's not allow it to happen ever again. And I want to say if it was not for the help from the Russian army there would be more casualties, more victims - thousands and thousands more." '

In all the swamp of propaganda orchestrated from the USA of late, and, I regret, followed largely by the Brits, Gergiev is saying something we are in danger of forgetting.

From news.bbc.co.uk

Late music warning . . .

2008-08-22T09:21:00.002+01:00

No, I won't. Give up writing about 'contemporary' music. So I did listen to Prom 48 (but not the Mahler) for the Stockhausen, which I will be reviewing, though I suppose it will frighten readers away again like it did last time.

I'm very awkward and difficult to please about two things: one is Mahler, who I kind of brought myself to some sort of musical maturity with at the ages of 16 and 17, when I listened to hardly anything else, so even now I don't want to risk a disappointment, and the other is Leonore No3, which I should probably be banned from ever reviewing for a different reason.

That's because a very old recording, found in my grandmother's forgotten box of records, was what must have introduced me to classical music at the age of about eight or nine. I can still hear how I want it to be in my head, even after all these years.

Though the Gurzenich orchestra had some nice bits in it (offstage trumpets? rousing timpani) I thought their Leonore had a rather heavy undertow to it that stopped it swimming up to the sparkling surface. And I don't think the Parsifal encore was ever going to make it into the sunlit uplands.

Still, if you think I'm wrong and I should listen to the Mahler 5, you'd better tell me within the next week. I'm not going to tell you when the Stockhausen Punkte will appear; it'll be a nice surprise, won't it?

Prom 45: Liquid Architecture

2008-08-21T08:43:00.004+01:00

Anybody can do it, can’t they? All you need is a computer, Garageband and, or, the sort of audio editing software I use, and there we are. No simple two-track tape; how many do you want? Eight, sixteen, forty eight? Dolby Surround? 5.1? So why is it worth bothering about this old curmudgeonly bear of a bloke called Edgar Varèse?

It’s simple really. Varèse could imagine a musical concept, and create it as a whole. And an awful lot of people playing with their computers are really just patching together ‘found sounds’ and they don’t have that. Maybe, as Boulez said in the interval ‘bio’, with “more knowledge of musical language” he would have gone further, but I think I hear an IRCAM philosophy talking here. I’ve never really seen Varèse as a composer of music, but a creator of soundstages. Of sound events. Of sonic buildings.

And Poème électronique (doesn’t that title remind you of ‘poème concrête’? I think it should) is a construction: just listen to the way some sounds are carefully repeated, how they carry a kind of flowing motion of the kind you get in the curves of Le Corbusier buildings. How they cycle: and of course, we are thinking electronics here, so we should also be thinking ‘kilocycles’ as well as kilohertz. Yet even this short piece can deliberately startle you with a heart-stopping—purely human—scream.

Yet, on a very simple level, you can listen to it simply as a sound image of a city; but these sounds are not mere imitations of footsteps and construction work (or even the unnerving whistle of a steam engine that, like the ‘footsteps’ has a human echo instead of, like others, an electronic one). They are the sounds you hear just before it gets light, when you cannot be sure they were real, in a dream you have just woken from and cannot quite recall, or ones you have simply imagined. They have come to exist outside reality, only in some inner one. They are the sounds heard by someone who is separate from all the rest of us, the ‘outsider’ of Camus. And you can feel yourself taking up that very lonely distance as you listen. That scream says “Why am I out here. . ?”

Apparently Varèse said of a contemporary composer: “He creates shit and gets paid in gold. I create gold and get . . .) Forget that this is a relatively simple piece in its technology. That’s irrelevant. It is a little nugget of gold.

It’s been said Philips were somewhat ambivalent about the Poème électronique at their Brussels pavilion fifty years ago, but I can’t altogether credit that. If they were lukewarm about this kind of music, then they certainly made up for it within a couple of decades or so with their superb Xenakis recordings. I liked the silvery sleeves, too.

He would have laughed, very sardonically I think. Transferring my digital recording of Déserts from one computer to another, I found (after I'd deleted the original) I hadn't copied all my data files for it, so my software helpfully interpolated hundreds of bars of silence. Now if I'd recorded that on my two track reel-to-reel, that wouldn't have happened, would it? Anyway, I want to listen to all of Jonathan Harvey's Speakings instead of just the last few minutes, so I'll listen to the repeat on R3 in a few days. Prom 45 'sounds' as though it was a very intriguing programme.

R3 Relay

Prom 45: Varèse, Poème électronique

Hitting the G-Spot

2008-08-21T03:19:00.005+01:00

G as in Gerghiev, of course. And as in Prom 46 with the LSO (in brilliant form, particularly the Leader, who delivered a hauntingly beautiful solo) playing Sleeping Beauty. (The full version, which we are not that likely to hear again.) I was a little surprised that it seemed to take the audience a while to warm to it, but the thing about Gerghiev is that he constructs his performances with tremendous integrity: he knows where he's going, you follow. And you have to keep your wits about you from the very first few bars, or you won't get it for ages.

A glorious performance, like an Eisenstein film in sonic technicolour, and you could 'see' the story in your mind just as you do listening to a fairytale told you before you've learnt to read it for yourself. Very different to the kind of performance you might imagine from reading the notes, too.

Until tomorrow, however, that's all you'll get, because I've cajoled a friend, who's in London for her annual Proms fix, to write this one up for me to make a bit of a change. And if you didn't listen to it, off with you to the iPlayer at once. As far as I can see, it won't be repeated next week on R3 (or any other time, except possibly in the autumn or spring) in the afternoon, alas.

Some prommers in the Arena just hadn't been concentrating the way they're supposed to. How on earth could you possibly end up so uninvolved and unabsorbed in a performance like this, and towards the end of Act 3, so you prefer to haul out your mobile phone and read your text messages? (I was momentarily distracted by the blue glow.) Apart from the fact they (there were two of them) shouldn't have had the damn things switched on anyway.

Which reminds me: listening to a few minutes here and there editing things like the interval talk and announcer chatter out of my recording when I got home, I can assure you that the R3 broadcast was about as close to what you would hear from a good seat in the hall as you could get.

(By the way, if you want to hear a broadcast Prom just the way the engineers do in their OB van, you'll need to invest in a pair of Dynaudio Acoustics AIR speakers . . .I asked . . .)

RAH Live

Prom 46: Valery Gerghiev, LSO; Tchaikovsky: Sleeping Beauty

Bad language . . .

2008-08-20T15:57:00.002+01:00

An email from the BBC: "I understand you have been trying to post a message on the Message Board. . .The BBCi Player Messageboards will only allow posts that are in English, and your post appears to include words that are not."

Well, even given the number of English/British/American pieces at the Proms this year, there's still a fair chance a post about a Prom would, wouldn't it? Does that mean we have to translate 'ritardando' or 'molto vivace'? There are times . . .

Wails and Whales

2008-08-19T21:09:00.006+01:00

For various reasons (a friend's birthday being just one, and needing to conserve my energy, such as it is, for actually going to the RAH tomorrow for Gerghiev, another) I hadn't intended to listen to the Jonathan Harvey part of Prom 45, but I caught just a few minutes of 'Speakings' because the concert seemed to be running late.

I was quite entranced by what seemed like a sonic philosophical dialogue between whales and dolphins, being a bit prosaic about it. It will have to wait until the R3 repeat next week, though, now, before I can listen to it properly. I suggest you try it on the iPlayer in the meantime if you didn't hear it.

The Varese (which I was longing to hear again) I've recorded, however, and I'll try to write that up soon. I was rather struck by how well the two composers may have fitted together in this Prom, but I could be wrong . . .

I see whoever uploads the notes to the 'About the Music' pages has done it again! The Varese links are the wrong way round. Get a grip over there, will you?

(Why is it every time I write about somebody like Stockhausen, Varese or Messaien, half my readers disappear? They aren't communicable diseases, you know! Some of these pieces are half a century old, or more, and composers didn't become extinct about 1870 . . . I'm getting upset. It'll be Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty tomorrow, OK, so you can come back now! )

Prom 43: Consider the lilies of the field . . .

2008-08-19T10:23:00.007+01:00

I first came across Vaughan Williams’ Flos Campi many years ago in a recording (it could well have been the only one around, though mine was second hand) by the University of Utah Chamber Choir and Utah Symphony Orchestra under Maurice Abravanel. Not one of the greatest orchestras, and it was an absolutely terrible recording technically, but I was fascinated by the music.

It was so different to the ‘Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams’ I’d been taught to despise, an artificial dogmatism that it took me years to overcome. I wasn’t confident enough then to withstand peer pressure; in fact, I still feel a bit twitchy about my current faves and pet hates, so I admit to covertly sneaking away from here sometimes to see if, somewhere, just one other proper professional reviewer might agree with me. There’s comfort even in the midst of a flock of vultures. . .But I never could seem to persuade other people to like it.*

And of course, I was young enough still to remember the guilty erotic frisson of reading, as a teenager, the Song of Solomon free of the ‘love for the church’ gloss that, like Vaughan Williams, I’d come to scorn and never found in the least plausible, though I must admit I think the foot fetishism of the epigraph to Part 6 of Flos Campi eluded me then.

I wonder if people don’t release themselves into the sensuality of it? Or even its sexuality, because in parts it really is: in this performance the chorus sounds near to an orgasm at one point, and the first section, which the oboe and viola share, creates an air of sexual longing that’s hard to beat.

I realise there are places (as when we have harp and chorus) that could easily be dismissed as sentimental, but that is not to be involved. Something tells me that to really grasp Flos Campi , to allow yourself to flow into it, you have to have had both gentle, loving erotic sex, and to have desperately missed having it. And I defy anyone not to sense spring petals opening and cheeks blooming in the ‘For lo, the winter is past’.

The chorus, in this piece, has to be heard as much as a part of the orchestra as any of the instrumental sections: more so, since the concentration is so much on that intensely sensual viola. (In the performance tonight it was only—I think rightly—”husky with passion” in part three. Elsewhere it was delicately sensual and longing.) Lawrence Power played it beautifully.

And then, of course, there is a gently jokey little piece of fake orientalism in the “Palanquin” processional; about the only place where you remember there is a whole orchestra here somewhere apart from the viola and the chorus.

And I can’t imagine that the penultimate section doesn’t really convey that “eyes across a crowded room” sensation to anybody. And the last moments of the viola fade in real tenderness and lovelorn-ness. Flos Campi is a love story, and, it's just dawned on me, a kind of virtual ballad sung only in sounds. Unusual in its form, it may be, but I still can’t see why it’s so easily dismissed.

Maybe it makes the English nervous? They’ve been brought up with all that subconscious Puritanism? I can’t persuade you? Try listening to it in the bath, with scented candles, a glass of something lightly fizzy and maybe a companion . . .

R3 relay

Prom 43: City of London Sinfonia, Lawrence Power (viola), BBC singers, Richard Hickox; Vaughan Williams: Flos Campi

*I can see from one dismissive review by someone who is around the age now I was then, I’m still likely to find it difficult.

Attuned to the audience

2008-08-19T05:32:00.007+01:00

I'd meant to mention in the review of the Glagolitic Mass that Boulez had, I thought, rather longer pauses than usual between the sections. To allow the more bronchitic members of the audience plenty of time to get their coughing out of the way before the music got going again? He had been in one of the boxes the night before, I gather, so he must have noticed how bad it seems to be this year. . .

(I don't really like splattering personal messages about, but perhaps I should offer an apology to my own regular 'audience': there might be a hiatus in this blog for a day or two, since just at the moment I'm suffering from a bit more pain than usual, and also somewhat from the side-effects of the drugs I take to try to kill it. So don't assume I've gone to watch the Olympics instead . . .)

Permanent ink, indelible performances

2008-08-18T22:44:00.005+01:00

I’m not going to suggest that written music criticism (and certainly not mine, if you’re nice enough to let me call it that in the first place) is, or even should be, permanent. Some does last, of course, and we re-read it to grasp a flavour of an historic performance, or interpretation (Cardus?) or for its literary style (Shaw?). Or maybe, in the case of one more current standard-bearer, just schadenfreude . . .

What has struck me fairly forcibly again this year, pace Paul Daniel’s comment I quoted earlier, is how often people appear to confuse live performance with recorded performance. They are two entirely different things. Even when a live performance is recorded, it is rare now for even a ‘live recording’ not actually to be in fact the product of more than one performance and even a rehearsal or two. A recording is generally treated as if it is to be permanent, repeatable, historic record. Sorry about the pun, I can’t get around it.

A concert is simply the product of the circumstances of the time it was performed. In that sense, it is impermanent, ephemeral, of the moment. We might remember it, if it is particularly rare, innovatory, well-played, or just jibed well with our own mood at the time, but it is wrong to treat it as though it should be preserved even if we’ve recorded it ourselves.

Two things in a lot of writing about the Proms (particularly on the R3 Message Board this year) have struck me as being, in this context, a little foolish and mistaken. One is to criticise a live performance as though it should achieve the equivalent of the perfection that can be obtained technically in a studio recording. There a cracked horn, an early entry, can be replaced or corrected. It can’t be in a live performance, and I don’t see why people should make a fuss about it when it happens.

If you hear that on a recording, well, of course, that is unprofessional: simply because it’s meant to be heard more than once, and will become irritating the second hearing, infuriating the third, intolerable after that. In a live performance, we wince for a second, then it’s over and done with. It’s only worth bothering about if it is emblematic of generally sloppy playing, conducting, or poor ensemble. And even then, the quality of the interpretation, or the music's rarity, can make it forgiveable.

So I think, to come to the second, constant comparisons between Prom performances and recordings are mistaken, even pointless. As is the underlying assumption that every time a conductor and an orchestra performed a certain work, it always must have sounded exactly like a particular recording of it. It’s plain wrong to talk of Toscanini’s X or Furtwangler’s Y in the broad terms many do, when they simply mean W or Z recording. And it’s a way of looking at performance that does the Proms, particularly, a disservice.

Of course, it can be useful, sometimes, to elucidate the ‘sound’ or style of a concert by referring to differences between it and a recording most readers might be presumed to have heard. But that is a very different thing to saying, as I seem to have read often, that so-and-so’s interpretation was rubbish because such-and-such-another’s was the epitome of perfection.

And of course, the ‘perfection’ of a recording, as I’ve hinted, may not actually be all it seems. I’ve known recordings (I’ve been at the sessions) where it would surprise people to hear that the ‘perfection’ was attained through an editing process that amalgamated more than forty takes of just a few bars each (not necessarily even played in the right order!) in a piece that lasted no more than fifteen minutes. The one I’m thinking of was, I was very amused to read when the recording was released, praised for its ‘natural fluidity’, even for having ‘obviously been done in a single take’.

That, of course, is how it should appear. In fact, the chances of any listener finding out any different from hearing a recording made pretty well any time during most of the last two decades are as near zero as makes no difference, thanks to digital editing. I know of another recording where a few bars of percussion were ‘spliced in’ from being recorded long after the sessions in the recording engineer’s garage because of a mistake that couldn’t be corrected at the time.

Both the engineer and I waited with considerable curiosity for a particular critic who frequently complained of hearing ‘bad edits’ to spot it. He didn’t; which is not surprising, because even I, after I’d failed the test (I was up half the night determined I was going to tell the engineer I’d found it at the following afternoon’s session) and was then tipped off to exactly where it was, could never have sworn on the Bible I could actually hear it. . .

Even the BBC isn’t always entirely purist, although they do tend to resort to a little ‘trickery’ only in an emergency. Obviously, they edited out the notorious ‘mobile phone obbligato’ * which drowned the clarinet at the beginning of the Rattle/BPO Rite of Spring for the repeats, but I know of at least one occasion when a recording was actually patched together from two separate performances in different halls with wildly different accoustics and levels, because of a technical problem with the mics during the performance that was intended to be broadcast later. I know of that one, because courtesy of Avid, I was allowed to try my hand at comparing my digital needlework with the BBC’s. . .

So, I’m beginning to feel the force of Paul Daniel’s argument rather the more this year. And, of course, that is why you will seldom read here a list of recordings that are ‘better’ than or even only ‘different’ to the night’s performance. It should I think, be allowed to stand entirely on its own. Comparisons, like trainers, after a while are odorous . . .

* I haven't heard one so far this year (he says crossing his fingers). Perhaps the BBC's pre-concert announcement has finally got through. (I particularly liked the very emphatic, justifiably curt "Please switch OFF your mobile phones" that ran for a couple of seasons.) But I simply cannot understand all those people who cannot bear to stop texting or reading their SMS messages until the second the conductor raises his baton. Nothing in the world can be that urgent. Or of it is, why are they about to spend an hour and a half at a concert?

Prom 40: A Mass for the Masses

2008-08-18T06:17:00.011+01:00

I see the BBC web people sorted out the links to the programme notes (so you’re reading my blog, eh? Don’t go away, I’ve got a question for you, and you’ll see in the last para I’m extremely angry about something else seemingly even more careless) but they still managed to confuse me. Am I supposed to call the piece that ended the first half of Prom 40 a ‘Concertino’ or a ‘Capriccio’?

Whatever, it was wonderfully capricious; ‘capering’, as in the root sense of the word. Even if the choice of instrumentation was capricious in the more common sense . . . Still, it worked marvellously, especially with that groaning, playfully head-butting euphonium. Forgive me for putting off the review this deserves, for apart from not being able to decipher my handwriting 48 hours on, my pen split after the first few bars and spread ink all over my notes and my fingers thereafter, which didn’t help. I’ll have to get back to you on this one, but it really was superb.

I don’t know anything about the Paul Wingfield ‘reconstruction’ of Janacek's Glagolitic Mass, and I have too much to catch upon to go into it thoroughly, so I’ll leave that aspect to others. Whatever it entails, Boulez and his forces made it utterly convincing and absorbing. A blogging colleague, if he’ll allow me to be so familiar (Doundou Tchil) wrote that it “has always been a poser to me, because it's huge and sprawling, and that sort of thing tends to bring out extreme syrup from most conductors.”

I don’t know whether he will agree, but this was Rice Krispies popping all over the place, with a nice solid foundation of whatever a substantial Slavonic peasant breakfast equivalent of bacon eggs and toast might be. No clogging golden (or Maple) syrup anywhere. And a good helping of goat’s milk instead of skimmed in more than a few places where the ‘folk’, or ‘popular’ roots showed through, pointed up very neatly and unselfconsciously by Boulez, and sung with real pleasure, understanding and grasp by the combined BBC Symphony and London Symphony Choruses. . . Who also managed to convey perfectly the heady smell of incense of a Greek Orthodox church in the more purely liturgical parts.

Boulez even showed us in the Intrada, Introduction and elsewhere, without any pedantry or pedagogy, where the Mass has some foundation both in Slavonic popular music, and even in the Sinfonietta, which any competent musician could probably reconstruct almost entirely from the first three minutes.

There were sections that were dance-like: the ‘Svet’ (Sanctus) where you could visualise the chorus in full peasant costume; trance-like (the Agnus dei) with its romantic lyricism, numinous stings and almost ethereal woodwind; and rousingly, exuberantly rowdy, like a crowd at the fair, in the stunning ‘Slava’ (Gloria).

And what tension in the complexity of the Kyrie. Boulez built it up with a perfect grip on chorus and orchestra, relaxing (as he did elsewhere), then tautening it in almost Hitchcockian fashion, until in the Crucifixus, the culminating ‘scream’ from the chorus was almost unbearable.

The penultimate movement is a soaring, vivid, vibrant organ solo (played by Simon Preston, who else?) which was an entire cathedral in itself, as glorious, as huge, as Santa Sophia. Yet played with superb delicacy of touch and sympathy. The last movement, the ‘repeat’ of the Intrada, now celebratory, joyous and like a rowdy country fete, Boulez took at breakneck pace, without a single stumble. It was breathtaking.

There is, of course, always a little snag in this sort of performance at the Proms, and, because the BBC either cannot or will not pay the sort of fees most toprank singers demand (though I did, gloriously, hear Monserrat Caballe in a Prom once) we are often a little let down by the quality of the soloists, however much they make up for it, as they did in this Prom, by sheer enthusiasm.

I thought the soprano in the ‘Slava’ (Gloria) wobbly, and not (at least as I heard it from the radio broadcast) really powerful enough, and sometimes strained; the mezzo and tenor I also thought were less forceful than I might have hoped, though clearly Simon O’Neill (tenor) was putting his soul into it, as was the bass (Peter Fried) much as Boulez’ Mass really sounded as though it needed a thoroughly ‘Russian’ sounding one.

Even so, this was a truly glorious performance. Another from this season that if you missed on the night, or if you miss the repeat, you will regret. As this supposedly was Boulez’ final appearance as a conductor (according to the presenter, though concerts are advertised in London and Paris through to December) you might not get another chance.

(It looks as though that comment might have been the product of very casual or careless background ‘research’ for his script that nobody thought of checking. Apparently, Boulez has said he doesn’t want to conduct opera any more, not simply not conduct . . .For god’s sake, BBC, get this kind of thing right, will you? It’s not the first time this has happened in the last three or four seasons. Since it really startled me, it serves me right for not checking it properly on the night, too. So now, I can’t trust a single word any of the presenters say, and I’m going to have to ‘fact check’ everything myself. Make my life harder, why don’t you? I would have been sacked by any of my editors on the spot for something like that.)

I apparently misunderstood—not paying enough attention—the announcer in fact referring to his last appearance conducting opera. (See comment.) However, that doesn't invalidate my general strictures on the quality of some of the background research and proof-reading for Proms material over the last few years: the confusion between the 'Concertino' and 'Capriccio' being a prime example: it's the 'Concertino' in the Proms Guide and 'Capriccio' in the Radio Times, I see.

I've already admitted I make mistakes too; and I dare say before the end of the season I'll make more. I believe I've assigned Doundou Tchil the wrong gender. Sorry.

R3 relay

BBCSO, BBC Symphony Chorus, London Symphony Chorus/Pierre Boulez: Janacek, Glagolitic Mass.

The photo is of a mural in a Birmingham house (now destroyed) representing a scene from Petrushka, painted by house guests in, I believe, the late twenties, to surprise Philip Sargent Florence (whose wife, Lalla, was prominent in the early family planning movement) on their return from a performance in Paris . . .The cottage over the stables, which he rented to Louis McNeice, and in which W H Auden stayed when he was in Birmingham, has also gone, and there isn't even a blue plaque in the housing estate that now covers the site. . .

All that glisters . . .

2008-08-17T21:12:00.002+01:00

Occasionally, I get irritated and I dig my heels in. Even if sometimes it feels like they’re just sinking into soft sand. I will not, nohow, review a PR stunt. Or another fashion parade. Sharon Bezaly (Pron 43, Nigel Osborne's Flute Concerto) came with “gold hair, in a gold sheath dress.” Carrying “a 24-carat gold flute.” What the hell has any of that to do with music?

Still, I liked the almost genteely understated (in orchestral forces) Mozart Symhony No 34 with the London Sinfonietta under Richard Hickox.

Prom 40: Tarantara, tarantara!

2008-08-17T19:12:00.004+01:00

“I don’t care at all for tradition,” said Boulez in the interval interview on Radio 3. “I like to establish my own tradition! . . . A tradition is just an accumulation of mannerisms and. . . imitations. The real approach is just to take the score, a personal relationship with it, and try to give that to the audience.” (I’ve paraphrased a little, not being much cop at shorthand.) What he created in Prom 40 with Janacek’s Sinfonietta and Concertino, let alone the Glagolitic Mass, was definitely his own, quite new, ‘tradition”, and a superb, fascinating one, probably un-imitatable, it was too.

I didn’t know, but apparently this was Boulez’ final appearance as a conductor. He’s ‘retiring’ to concentrate on composition, the presenter said at the end of the concert.* What a way to go! And what a damn shame that we won’t have this kind of experience again. He hadn’t changed a bit since those glory days—what, thirty-odd years ago?—when he was Chief Conductor of the same orchestra he came back to tonight. We were really privileged.

Some Proms are epiphanies, as we rediscover a piece, like the Sinfonietta in this, that we have almost come to think of as banal through too-frequent, too-average playing. (It has never helped that the ‘fanfare’ introduced a British early afternoon soap for years.) The BBCSO’s under Boulez’s baton was another one this year. Not to mention the authentic ‘shock of the new’ we had when it came to the astonishing Concertino. I’d rescue that from a burning building well before I bothered about pretty well any of the ‘new’ contemporary pieces I’ve heard this season.

From the first notes of the ‘fanfare’, it sounded as though this was going to be different; not a brash blazing thing, a separate little showpiece blasted out to get your attentiion, though in its almost understated way, it did exactly that, but a proper opening statement of a theme. This Sinfonietta was, for once, absolutely true to its title. Tautly performed, very carefully, insightfully, constructed in the orchestral balance, piccolo, flutes and violins soaring with seeming casual simplicity above the statements of the brass. Pure, even, in its occasional unashamed, foxy side-glances at Romaticism, too. Vivaciously played, and presumably, conducted . . . Pure joy to hear like that.

Boulez commented to the effect that Janecek was not a ‘folk’ composer, but one who lived ‘popular’ music, and this was what this performance, and the Mass, brought out with tremendous clarity. And the BBCSO seemed to know, just as he trained them to years ago (with some difficulty at times, I seem to remember) though few of its members then could still be part of it now, instinctively, exactly what he wanted.

Oh dear, BBC websters, you’ve done it again! None of the links to the notes for these performances were what they seemed: those titled ‘Glagolitic Mass’ were for the Concertino, for the Sinfonietta, the Mass, and so on. Or something like that. I got confused. Like I did a couple of times last year, when they did the same sort of thing, only worse; Beethoven was transmuted into Glazunov, or something even more bizarre. Doesn’t anybody there a) know about classical music, b) read and/or c) check with someone competent at either if they don’t? I think I know the answers, and they ain’t encouraging. So just print all three, and sort it out later. Saves kicking your computer into inoperability out of frustration.

Between you and me, I had hoped I might be able to crib a little from them, never having heard the Concertino before. But, as you will see if you download them, that was a rather forlorn hope, so I had to rely entirely on my own. . .And 24 hours later I can barely read the damn scribbles.

And what with the Glagolitic Mass, then Belshazzar on Saturday and Flos Campi on Sunday, I haven’t time to listen to it all over again and It’s too late to learn proper shorthand now; I really must do something about my handwriting. To think I used to be able to do proper Italian Renaissance italic, even fairly quickly . . .

The Glagolitic Mass review, and maybe the Concertino, may have to wait a little while in consequence. (I can’t keep staying up this late; well, not writing, anyway.) That was also a superb, glorious, exciting Carl Orffian-Carmina Buranian (I mean that in the best, lively, engaging, communicating sense!) performance. Oh, those choruses! Tenor and bass pretty good, bit thinnish, bass a bit better; mezzo and soprano a bit wobbly.

Fantastic energy. But, oh, again, that wonderful orgasmic organ! Wrong word for an instrument in a mass, maybe, but this one was downright pagan in its festiveness anyway. It shivered my icons’ timbers, I can tell you; I could see the halos shuddering. Boulez, I swear, 83 (two years older than the BBC Proms themselves!) going on 23 tonight. I’d wondered about the ‘reconstruction’ of the score (I’ll have to delve a bit more into that sometime) but this performance totally justified the choice.

* I may have been the victim of some careless background 'research' for the presenter's script here. He is supposed to be conducting two concerts in London and one in Paris between now and the end of the year. Apparently, he has said he doesn't want to conduct opera, not not conduct . . . I apologise for not checking this myself. And I'm damned annoyed with the BBC, because I don't see why I should have needed to. I won't take them on trust any more.

R3 relay

Prom 40: BBCSO/Pierre Boulez: Janacek, Sinfonietta; Concertino; Glagolitic Mass.

Plus ça change . . .

2008-08-17T14:34:00.011+01:00

I don't think I can cope with this opera and oratorio stuff from the 17th and 18th centuries. It's too modern for me.

First we have a self-obsesssed ruler who doesn't care about his country; will even get rid of his closest advisers without compunction when what they tell him doesn't suit. Even have them killed. Or drive them to suicide.

Then we have a self-obsessed ruler who lets his country go to wrack and ruin, an angry oppressed population, a warning he's really letting himself in for it, an invasion, the death of the ruler and reconstruction under the new forces.

What's that phrase the Neocons kept bandying about? And I seem to have heard again in a pot-calling-the-kettle sort of way very recently? "Regime Change"?

Prom 41 (Handel's Belshazzar—OAE, Charles McKerras) was superb. I'll be coming back to it.

Did somebody say 'old' music just isn't relevant to the 21st century . . .

(You'll have noticed I'm trying to get the accents sorted, at last , I know it's long overdue. . .Speaking of instant gratification, I've noticed a lot of would-be readers of this blog scour Google for reviews within 24 hours of the concert ending. I can't always manage that, you know. Even the nationals don't. And I've been catching up on some much-needed sleep this weekend. Pateience. Patience. . .)

In one ear and . . .

2008-08-15T09:56:00.015+01:00

Isn't it odd how two people can hear, apparently, exactly the same things, and be diametrically opposed in their conception of what they mean? This is The Times on the Schoenberg Variations:

". . .[it] is a test of any ensemble's technique and concentration. The orchestra not only swept through it with compelling passion, but managed to characterise the fleeting mood changes—some no more than a flicker—without compromising the overall flow."

I can't say I heard "compelling passion"—rather 'determination'—but I heard all the rest—and they were the things I thought were so wrong with it. All sweeping flow and a few fleeting flickers . . .

Oh, well. Perhaps I'm in a bad mood . . .or is it politically dodgy to be a bit mean to Barenboim and his band in print? I wonder. . .

(And thinking of people having only half an ear, I've read in the Guardian that the 'L'histoire d'un Soldat' was "chiefly unsuccessful because it was narrated in French." (As of course, so many have been this season, seeing as how they were sung in French, German, Italian, even Latin.) This in the Guardian, not the bloody xenophobic Daily Mail? Jesus, the sort of language I'd like to use about that I don't think I dare to, even in a blog. Quel con! Quelle rhodomontade! Zenophobe! Cochonnerie! Je vous emmerde!)

As of now, you'd better pronounce my first name French-style, that's with an acute accent on the E. [i-rique. Got it? I'm going to insist on it.] Don't bother trying with the last one, the French can't do that at all . . .In one part of the north of England, though not the one I come from, it's actually pronounced 'Brouwat" which they could, only it's too complicated to explain . . .

Prom 39: Tinker, tailor, soldier . . .

2008-08-15T01:12:00.006+01:00

Nous vous proposons à cette soirée, un petit opéra, un petit drame, pour sept instruments et une voix, qui est très passionnante et un beau plaisir minuscule….It’s OK, don’t panic, the rest is in English. Sort of.

Though there was a momentary panic early on in the Stravinsky L'histoire d'un soldat. Even I can hear cracked notes from the brass and tell when a note on a string instrument should be flat, not off altogether. But they recovered.

I think they recovered, for I found the music rather flat too, only occasionally dramatic, certainly never melodramatic, and monochromatic. I can’t see why this should be. There were so many missed opportunities, so many points at which the narrator was so much more dramatic than the musicians, and without him one would have felt just as forlorn as that soldier finding the violin had no sound.

That’s not to say the musicians were not highly skilled; they were. There were some lovely sweet bars from the violin when they were needed, some splendid passages from the two brass players, but, all the same it was cold. And surely the parodic Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott was, for all its harmonium impersonation—and why wasn't that sustained?—neither out-and-out-parody, nor ironic, not even post-modernist. Somebody didn’t really get the joke.

And, at the end, what was the percussionist doing, playing like a street musician collecting pennies? So, I’m sorry to tell you, I was a bit disappointed again. The playing was, que dirai-je? Sequential. It lacked sufficient narrative cohesion. And any sense of a fairy tale, let alone a post-war fairy-tale and one that belongs as much to the Thirty Years War as the First. Yet at least some of the members of this band must have been brought up on Khalil-wa-dumnah? (I don't think I've got the transliteration right, there, but it's too late at night to ring a friend and ask.) And in the devilish dispossession of war that is the point?

But what saved it was Patrice Chéreau’s wonderfully dramatic narration, which had all the colours and expression and narrative flexibility the playing mostly lacked. Perhaps that was the intention? But if it was, why? It was an utterly entrancing bit of story-telling: I really felt like a child again, wanting to see how it all turned out, seeing the characters so vividly in my head, and yet hoping it wouldn’t end too soon. Even though I know the story . . .

And I’m sure at one point I heard him make that very French rude gesture: when you slap the elbow of your right forearm up with its clenched fist with the palm of your left hand . . .Something certainly sounded like that . . .

I’m so glad I could follow the French. Not that it’s so difficult, actually, and made even easier thanks to the narrator’s superb diction. (Did the audience not, or not have a translation? I thought they’d giggle a little in places, and when they didn’t, I felt a bit foolish.) Unforgiveable, BBC: why didn’t Patrice Chéreau get a credit in print, or on the web, nowhere that I could see? He was indispensable.

Note to presenters: if you must try to pronounce names in French, it sounds very silly when it’s done so “exsplausifelie”. Forget “Allo, Allo”, OK? That’s not actually French they’re speaking . . . . And practice saying “Intercontemporain” please. No, no, try again. You can manage ‘ensemble’ on your own, can’t you, though I know it’s a bit tricky putting them together? I’ve already screamed at my speakers over Alice Coote’s “ondgenoo” for ‘ingenue’. This guy Pierre Chéreau might give lessons . . . The story lasted less than an hour, nowhere near long enough for ‘Patrice’ to turn into ‘Pierre’. Yes, I know I make mistakes too, and I had a very long day as well after not much sleep, perhaps that’s why I’m in a bit of a temper, but this does smack of carelessness.

Apparently the orchestra flew into London from Naples late last night, were rehearsed from 10am until 2, and were on at 7. Tomorrow they’re flying off again. The presenter said Barenboim ‘pushes them hard’ almost approvingly. Too hard, I think, and I also think it was showing tonight. Why? A ‘maestro-onic’ ego trip?

R3 relay

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim; Stravinsky: L’histoire d’un Soldat, narr. Patrice Chéreau.

Prom 38: Falling off the divan

2008-08-14T20:05:00.005+01:00

I said I wasn’t going to review the Schoenberg from the ‘Divan’ and Barenboim tonight; so I won’t, though I did listen to it. I’ll just comment on it.

It is clear, as the presenter told us, that the orchestra does know the music very well.
Also clear, as Barenboim apparently said, that it is “A difficult piece to make work.” Whether he himself had any real, developed, considered, conception of what to do with it, I am not so sure. Conceptually, it seemed incoherent to me, just the style of performance overall that I would give to a friend so she could confirm to herself why she hates the Schoenberg of this period.

Apparently, some of the Arab members of the band were heard ‘jamming’ one of the themes in Arabic style earlier. I would have liked to have heard that; I suspect they may have shown a better sense of the structure of the Variations for Orchestra than their conductor, if they could do that. And I have heard just enough Arabic music to guess what it might have sounded like. Now that would have been very interesting if they had been allowed some of that freedom in the 'real thing' tonight. I’m sure they could recognise the musical meaning of the plural . . .

OK, I did say I was tired. Perhaps I’m jaded. Maybe I’ll have another go at it next week, but this really is a favourite of mine, and despite the skill of the orchestra, I was disappointed. Apparently he told them, being “tough on them”, that the piece sounded sometimes like “rush hour in Hong Kong” in rehearsal. I wonder if he put them off. It sounded more like SUV’s rolling along a 12-lane American freeway at 3 in the afternoon to me.

Prom 38: East-Western Divan Orchestra: Schoenberg, Variations for Orchestra.

Prom 37: Peacocks, Pride, Perdition and Fall

2008-08-14T01:56:00.008+01:00

Tonight’s conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, said of Ravel’s La Valse that it is “the apotheosis of the Viennese waltz . . .leading to death”. In his hands, and those of the Gothenberg Symphony, that was the very least of it.

It began so darkly, so threateningly, that it could have been the soundtrack to a horror movie. In this ballroom, somewhere behind a garlanded and gilded column, lurked Baron Samedi; the dancers would have seen only the evening dress, but been just aware, in the corner of their eyes, of the white grinning skull under the top hat . . . This was the last dance of the Hapsburg dynasty, blithely pretending to be unaware that their Vienna was no longer holy. nor Roman. nor an Empire, and the chandeliers (I didn’t pinch this from Gerald Larner’s notes; I read them later, honest) would soon crash to the floor and the mirrors be shelled into shards.

This waltz was the Viennese, stately, but doomed, dancing away from the Sachertorte, out of Vienna, ending dazedly alongside the Archduke’s carriage in Sarajevo, just before the bomb exploded half the world. There have been some truly enlightening interpretations of Ravel this season like the Bolero; this was most certainly another. “You should see whatever comes through the music,” Ravel said. And what an extraordinary, cleverly-coloured moving (in both senses) picture Dudamel and his Gothenberg band gave us to watch.

A lot of colours, tempi changes, opium . . .so Dudamel on the Symphonie Fantastique. “If it’s sometimes crazy, sometimes ugly, it will be perfect.”

And, with a lot of colours, changes in tempi, sometimes crazy, sometimes ugly, so it was. And the opium? I’ll come to that. The first movement was not ugly at all; an opium haze from the growling basses, the kind of sharply defined colours you only see through pinpoint pupils when you’ve taken drugs striking through it, and a growing tension that prefigured all the themes in the subsequent movements.

This was not a day-trip through storyville with a bland guide speaking a commentary on the coach, this performance. Rather a psychological journey that forced you into travelling along the synapses of Berlioz’s psyche half in the dark. And, to appreciate it fully, needing at least an inkling of Jungian archetypes and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and the psychological horror stories both can become.
In challenging contrast, the ball was almost purely lyrical. Adolescents dancing together; unaware of the implications of their fall, the boy not anticipating rejection. I’ve been to that ball (as disco, of course); hoped with that same assurance. Been shamed and shocked by rejection later. Haven’t we all? It was all there; conducted with such calmness, but such tightening tension in recognising our knowledge of what was to come in the story, that at the end, someone in the audience actually screamed at being released. I can understand that.

There was nothing of the pretty-pretty pastoral in the third movement. This was sexually highly charged; shepherds as lovers, the rolling timpani presaging pre-coital anxiety withdrawal and (unfulfilled) post-coital tristesse, the storm psychological, not meteorological. I did feel, however, that the Gothenberg was being stretched here just beyond its skills in trying to attain the full range of colour and textures I think Dudamel was after. Nor, at times, I thought, could they entirely cope with the tempi being demanded of them. But the last bars were of immense pathos that long outlasted their mere seconds of real time. The audience seemed to have been made palpably uncomfortable by it. Again, I’m not surprised.

So then, in the ‘March to the Scaffold’ there was ugliness, and sharp changes in tempi, and bitter grinding horns, emphasised by sudden alterations form f to mf. This was no proud, head-held-high walk to the executioner. In Britain, we imagine the scaffold as a hangman’s platform which all but perhaps a bare handful of people now alive know only from drawings and photographs; the victim, resigned, the march a funereal one. This was a bloodstained gory guillotine. This was hands clawing in fear at the ladder, nails stripped to the root on the rungs in desperation to escape, eyes rolling in terror at that high gleaming steel blade poised to fall and send gouts of blood pulsing in waves from the severed neck. This was ‘crazy’, the nightmare you wake from but cannot escape, and that leaves you as horror-struck awake as you were asleep and feels as though it will never fade.

So to the ‘Sabbath’. A wild gallop of spectres in a mad rush to perdition, a Totentanz beyond Ravel’s worst nightmares, even with his experience of the War, with near-crazy rhythms that almost got out of control, but that Dudamel just—just—kept under control. Although they worked desperately hard, I’m not sure the Gothenberg entirely caught the shivery, hyper (hysterical, in the Freudian sense) conclusion to the movement that I think Dudamel was attempting, but one could not help but be caught up in it and, perhaps, filling it out from one’s own imagination.

Yes, this Fantastique was flawed in parts, technically, but it was a great conception, and they can be easily ignored when, like tonight, you find in a symphony you thought you knew, there is still more to be discovered, more to be experienced, and so differently. The audience applause was riotous and just went on and on. Quite right too.

I have been looking for a successor to Argenta, off and on, for years. Gustavo Dudamel, I am pretty sure after tonight, is it and Los Angeles is to be envied next year, as long as they give him his head. I just hope to god he avoids small planes. We can’t afford to have the same thing happen twice.

I shall return to Anders Hillborg’s fascinating and superbly played Clarinet Concerto [‘Peacock Tales’] shortly. It fits neatly, and this can come as no surprise now we can see where it’s all been leading, into this season’s edgy slightly off-the-wall jazz-cum-modernist-cum Romantic subtext.

Don’t dismiss it; as attention-grabbing—and attention-holding—and as much a ‘quasi-ballet’ as La Valse, as scary in its way as the ‘Walk to the Scaffold’ . . . Clever , unsuspected programming link there. And R3 followed up with a very interesting interview-cum-concert with him afterwards, a “Prom Composer’s Portrait” which I recommend to you via ‘Listen Again’ if you found the peacock a bit tough to chew on. In fact, it might be a good idea to listen to that first, if contemporary composers unnerve you.

If you want to hear ‘Tzigane clarinet’, however, do listen to Martin Frost’s cheery little encore piece, ‘Be Happy’ “arranged by [his] little brother” that trailed the peacock’s tail. The audience and I were, tonight, with this Prom. Very. So Dudamo gave us two encores; a Stenhammer piece to soothe the breasts that he’d ruffled with psycho-savagery in the Berlioz, and unsettled with La Valse, and then the brass section chucked their (not so strait) jackets away . . . And we had a fizzy little Latin rhumba to clap and stamp to.

I love these little sherbet sweeties conductors give us at the Proms sometimes as a thank you for working our brains hard—and actually paying out our hard-earned fivers for it, too—for the previous couple of hours. And it’s great fun.

What is all that crap about British stiff upper lips, eh? We can be very serious when we have to be, but we do know how to enjoy ourselves as well, you know; just as much as anybody from South America. Weird, and almost incongruous, as I daresay it might sound at the end of a night like this to some listeners abroad. It’s part of what makes the Proms, and possibly us Prommers, unique. And what attracts orchestras and conductors from around the world to come thousands of miles sometimes for just a night or two: it can’t possibly be the fees the BBC pays . . .

R3 Relay

Prom 37: Gothenberg Symphony Orchestra/Dudamel: Ravel: La Valse; Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique; Hillborg: Clarinet Concerto

I forgot to mention THE BELLS . . . (The capital letters are mandatory, to give you an idea what they sounded like.) Where did they nick them from? Westminster Abbey? Whitechapel Bell Foundry? I've never heard them ring like that . . . And I found out what the two encores were, didn't write them down, and now I've forgotten them as well and I'm going to have to look them up again . . .

East, West . . .

2008-08-13T06:41:00.005+01:00

. . . home’s best. That is, if you have somewhere you can be sure of calling ‘home’ with any sense of permanency, and some members, even the youngest, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, of course, will probably be uncertain of that for their entire lifetimes. Yes, politics rears its head again. So?

For all I now have a new respect, politically, for Daniel Barenboim after his Reith Lectures, I have seldom been happy with his conducting at the Proms in recent years. In fact, I walked out of one—and I can easily count the number of times I’ve done that on one hand—in utter dismay and real anger at what I thought was stolid, uncomprehending, and unimaginative conducting and a thoroughly banal interpretation. All the same I was quite taken at the time by last year's 'Wagnerian' Bruckner.

So, therefore, I would normally skip Proms 38 and 39 this week; the trouble is, I do like both the Schoenberg and the Stravinsky. . .and, obviously, I have some sympathy with the aims behind the foundation of the band.

However, be prepared for the reviews to appear rather late. To be honest with you, I’ve now listened to (sometimes twice) and concentrated hard on (you’ll have to take my word for that!) nearly 30 Prom concerts so far (even if I haven’t written about all of them) and I am beginning to suffer a touch of the Proms mid-season equivalent of the marathon runner’s ‘wall’.

I shall probably record the R3 repeats to listen to later, just to give me time to both catch up and get my second wind for what I hope are going to be some major, or at least extremely interesting, concerts coming up in the second half of the season. (Handel’s Belshazzar—Prom 41—looks pretty likely to me, and of course there’s Rattle’s Turangalila and Shostakovich 10 in Proms 64 and 65 not to mention several in between . . .)

(Photographer unknown.)

Prom 36: Night Thoughts

2008-08-12T23:21:00.004+01:00

Between Tuesday night’s Proms, I just had time to cook and eat my pasta and tomato and mascarpone sauce, come un buon ragazzo. (Last clue!) Perhaps because I wasn’t brought up a western Catholic, let alone in the Byzantine branch, I have always had a slightly guilty love for Orthodox chant. It’s been reinforced over the years by a friend who was brought up in the Greek Orthodox Church (but who, like me, is an atheist) who enthuses about the wonderful sonorities she regularly heard as a child.

It seemed to me, at first, that, besides it being clearly secular (there are Cossackian and traditional Russian rhythms in it, after all) that this performance of the Rachmaninov Vespers from the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Paul Hillier, was cool in an almost post-modernist way. It was certainly texturally delicate, almost fragile in places, even those wonderful passages from the basses kept very clean, not over-enriched as we might have expected, while the women’s voices were purely ethereal.

Perhaps I will be accused of being fanciful, but it does belong to 1915, and was sung, tonight, almost as a “mass in time of war”. Or, more accurately, “in fear” of war. (That really is lurking, somehow, under the surface of many pieces this year, and predated recent events.) Almost desolate at times; an offer of resignation to God that man has failed yet again, not a demand for attention and aid. And perhaps, who would know the desolation of this in their psyches than the Russians of Rachmaninov’s time, and the inhabitants of those small Baltic States over the last sixty years?

But emotion (purely and entirely musical, I think, not religious, and therefore untrammelled by the dogmas of belief) was palpable from the Estonian choir; not surprising perhaps, if what I have written in the last paragraph has any truth to it at all. It had a terrible beauty to it. I shall keep my recording.

This time, the notes (by Andrew Huth) are informative—hence my only trying to give you a broad impression—and indispensable.

R3 Relay

Prom 36: Rachmaninov: All-night Vigil (Vespers); Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Paul Hillier.

Prom 35: Sunlight and Storms

2008-08-12T21:22:00.004+01:00

Sorry, I can’t really get on with “In the South”, beautifully and sensitively played though it was by the BBC Phil and Sinaisky (especially the ‘canto populare’.) That, by the way, has never sounded ‘populare’ to me; and nor can I ever find myself really imagining the Italian Med, filthy weather or not, and I’ve seen it grey and nasty and shivered in the gales coming off it. Though not at Alassio, I admit.

It always seems to me more Elgarian ‘home thoughts from abroad’ — and not that Straussian, as the presenter tried to persuade us, except tangentially in the very colourful way it was played, surprisingly appropriately, tonight—rather than Italian. I reckon I should know. (Clue.) Maybe the photos mentioned in the notes would have helped, but I’ve never seen them.

Coincidentally, the weather in London tonight was just as foul as that Elgar experienced. But that felt very English rather than Mediterannean, too.

Isn’t the Vaughan Williams’ Piano Concerto peculiar? As a piano concerto, that is. I’m not familiar with it at all, but could almost be persuaded into listening to it more often by both the piano playing tonight (just a bit Lisztian, even a spot of diabolism in the first two movements?) by Ashley Wass and John Pickard’s notes.

There were, even, just a very few really Straussian bars in the Romanza. Ever since that Elgar 1, I have become all the more aware through interpretations during this Prom series that the English composers of this generation were by no means as insular as you might think. This performance emphasised that too.

I was very relieved that the presenter didn’t know what Wass’s, beautiful, sensitive, soothing, gentle solo encore was either. He hazarded Frank Bridge, and perhaps so might I, except it seemed more, well, elegant and spare. It was. . .Messaien? I would never have guessed. I have to look out for that.

The Sheherezade? Well, we all know it, don’t we? I was a little concerned as the first movement began with a slower tempo, more deliberate than I expected, but it was a perfect foil to the (gorgeous sounding, really stylish and full of variety of tone, throughout, as were the other principals) violin. In fact, Sinaisky’s tempi were, as it turned out (and it really hotted up until the last movement was practically superheated steam) perfectly judged, well into the gypsyish sections.

The Phil sounded suitably luscious (not lush) where it was needed. And a really forceful, vividly balanced sound from the orchestra in the last movement with a throughly wild violin and orchestra playing a storm that you wouldn’t believe even if you’d been in a hurricane in the Atlantic, finishing with golden rays of sunlit violin and harp chords and stunning timpani. I won’t stop being a fan of the Beecham recording, but this was a truly lovely, joyful, gloriously exciting and thrilling performance of great clarity, that could supersede it.

The audience went crazy. (I cheated and wrote this before they did. I’d have been bloody furious with them if they hadn’t. Being at home, I started clapping before the final chords died away, I’m allowed, there.) If you decided to skip it (and I nearly did, because I’ll be up late listening to the Vespers and wrting, again) you were wrong.

R3 Relay

BBCPO/Vassily Sinaisky; Ashley Wass (pno); Elgar, ‘In the South’; Vaughan Williams: Piano Concerto in C Major; Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade.

Glad to hear the Arena’s “Heave!” and the Gallery’s “Ho!” before the Vaughan Williams back up to strength tonight. I thought it was bit feeble last year.

If you listen to the repeat, that’s not microphone hiss your hear in the quiet solo piano passages, it’s rain pounding on the big corrugated dome of the Albert Hall shortly before it hit my windows, equally loudly. And what a fascinating, equally unexpected, R3 interval piece on the archived history (half a million images!) of the ‘Scheherezade’ photographic studio in Sidon, in Lebanon.

Oh, please, BBC, start handing out the free cough sweets again. Look, I smoke (too much, I have done for far too long and you could probably repair roads with what’s in my lungs) but I manage not to cough even listening at home. I once went through agonies at the Barbican muffling my mouth and nose in my hanky until I could hardly breathe, when I had to go despite suffering a terrible bout of ’flu, so if I can, so can some of the Proms audience in the posh seats. It’s nearly always them. It was really bad tonight, and Sinaisky even had to give them time to hawk after the second and third movements. We haven’t had smog in London for half a century, so there’s no excuse. It’s disrespectful. Unforgivable.

Prom 20: [Stock]HAUS[en]MUZIK

2008-08-12T02:58:00.007+01:00

When the Proms programmers think they can trust us with two of the longest programmes in one evening (getting on for four hours, altogether) of nothing but Stockhausen, no less, for the life of me I don’t understand why in other programmes of each season they have to pad out unfamiliar, but often easier, repertoire with traditional ‘sweeties’. Or has Stockhausen somehow become traditional and mainstream while I wasn’t looking?

I doubt that somehow, so I’ll credit the BBC with brave—and by all accounts, it turned out—very successful programming. The music making (and yes, that is what I do call it, for those of you out there who shudder at the thought of hearing even ten minutes of this genre, never mind four hours, and I’ll try to explain why) was breathtaking from all the players and conductors involved.

The only difficulty with ‘Gruppen’ was, hearing it at home, the overall physical ‘layout’ of the music was simplified, and probably needed less concentration, than might have been the case had I been in the Arena; I missed one of the essential aspects of the composition by not being in amongst the orchestras. I suggest you read the two expert bloggers on this music: Classical Iconoclast and Boulezian on that. Conversely, it probably made the intellectual layout easier to follow.
But the conductors, David Robertson, Pascal Rophe and Martyn Brabinns, along with he BBCSO, invited the intense concentration needed from a listener with astonishing facility, so that the 24 minutes of Gruppen, played with their crystal clarity, and total grasp, seemed to be over annoyingly quickly. I understand, now, why it has apparently become ‘traditional’ to repeat it.

Gruppen is full of groupings (as its name suggests) of tone colours, meticulously arranged instrumental connections, motives and themes, constantly interacting in kaleidoscopic fashion like a musical three-dimensional chess game played four-handed by two Grand Masters. Even if you are a novice at this game, because these leitmotivs and structures are, though mathematically organised, as easy to follow (even easier, maybe) than in a Wagner opera, that is why I say it is music.

I was upset, after such a superb performance, that the audience applause was at first very coy and tentative, but it did warm up, so perhaps they were taken by surprise by the ending, or found it difficult to relax their concentration for some seconds. You do need a little while to savour it after the end, I think. To allow your memory of the textures (speaking of which, the BBCSO percussionists were particularly, primus inter pares, brilliant) to settle.

Years and years ago there was a middle-of-the-road-music trumpeter who was always described as the ‘man with the golden trumpet’. In ‘Harmonien for solo trumpet’ (‘Klang: 5th hour’)’ Marco Blaauw’s was made of quicksilver, lightning, clouds, raindrops and rainbows by turns. I don’t know whether I should have done, but I heard late, haunting, Miles Davies, too. A spectacular showpiece, eloquent, elegiac in places, absolutely entrancing and absorbing for every one of its 15 minutes, and virtuoso playing from a trumpeter who apparently breathed through his skin. Perfect pure golden sound from the R3 engineers, too.

I decided not to review ‘Cosmic Pulses’, because I’m still unsure what relationship what we heard at home bore to the actual concert: whether it was a ‘stereo version’ of it, or a totally separate recording and therefore should be reviewed as one.

Anyway, congratulations to the R3 engineers and sound producers of this Prom: they mostly get ignored, tucked away out of sight in their cramped OB van round the side of the Albert Hall, hunched over their decks, paper cups of lukewarm canteen coffee in hand and ears pinned to their little LS3/5a’s (actually, not any more: they use Dynaudio Acoustics AIR monitors in the OB van now, and have done for the last three or four years or so, but they are just as tiny) but their work this evening was extraordinarily skilful and talented. Unlike those who work for Philips, Decca, DGG or EMI, their names never get mentioned. So, a round of applause, from me, at least. If you were listening on the ’net, or at home, you should join in. Louder, please. Make an effort so they can hear you!

R3 Relay

Prom 20: Stockhausen: Gruppen, Klang (Harmonien for Trumpet Solo)

(I’m sorry these reviews are too late for me, hopefully, to have persuaded you to listen via the iPlayer, if you didn’t hear the concert the first time around. “Kontakte’ and ‘Stimmung’ will follow, sooner or later, though on a somewhat imprecise timetable, just like the next London bus after the one you just missed. . .)

Prom 34: A Tsar Performance

2008-08-11T20:49:00.004+01:00

Another Prom first half that I hadn’t intended to listen to, but am very glad I did. I missed the Symphonic Dances, and reading Evan's review, now regret it bitterly, so I didn't want to potentially make the same mistake again.

If you need to be converted (as I did, which is why I nearly didn't listen to the first half)) to the view that Rachmninov’s First really does have some merit after all, then no-one could have been more convincing than Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic.

It was played just as you might have hoped from reading John Warrack’s pre-prom notes and better than Rachmaninov could ever have imagined. Had he heard this performance (far from sober, but in a totally different way to the first performance!) he might never have destroyed it.

In places, of course, it is too much, and too lush, but the BBCPO’s rich string sound (and beautifully dark-varnished celllos and basses) were never allowed completely to drown the themes, as they could all too easily have done. The presenter was perfectly justified, too in commenting on the ‘Russian’ sound of the brass and woodwind.

If Rachmaninov had really been vowing vengeance on someone on the last movement, the way that was emphasised with pepper-vodka astringency from strings and woodwind, I wouldn’t have cared to be the victim.

But of course, there is an awful lot of over-sugared tea in the Rachmaninov 1 samovar and its obvious youthful excesses, and sometimes over-scored excitability, but again, as exasperating as it can be, it was never allowed to coagulate into mush or go cold. It was transformed, in this performance, however unlikely it might seem, into youthful exuberance.

Noseda was described as being “passionate” about wanting to rehabilitate this symphony, and it showed. The audience greeted it with equal passion: rapturous applause and cheers which was very well deserved.

R3 Relay

Prom 34: Rachmaninov Symphony No1; Gianandrea Noseda, BBC Philharmonic.

(Presumably to make sure the broadcast sound supported Noseda’s obvious desire not to have an overblown sound from the orchestra. some sections were more closely-miked than usual, so, particularly in the first movement there was quite lot of clanking of music stands: though that does show the orchestra was as enthusiastic in its playing as Noseda was about the symphony. And, several dropped programmes—it is amazing what a racket the fluttering pages of just one make in the hall as they fall—and too much throat clearing from the audience. Somehow more intrusive than usual.)

Prom 31: America! Amerika! (From C to shining C.)

2008-08-11T03:24:00.004+01:00

There isn’t much to ‘Strike up the Band’, really, but all the same, it was a lovely rousing welcome to the Prom that really made me hear the roar of the greasepaint. It brought back vivid memories of my first ever visit to a provincial circus big top when I was a little boy—it would look much smaller than many a PR bash marquee I’ve been in since, I suspect, if I saw it now. A clown in desperately sad makeup (it had frightened me a little) took me round the back of the caravans and generators to see what, until he cheered up a little in the ring later for his spell in front of an audience and produced some very hammy snarls, looked like an even more unhappy tiger.

Both are probably long dead, neither I imagine guessed, any more than I, it would lead me to a fascination with both theatrical and musical performances, let alone to the backstage of theatre for a while when I grew up, and I have felt sorry for them both, as well as grateful, all these years. But I was just as bouncily happy, and just as expectantly on the edge of my seat, when Charles Hazelwood and the BBC Concert Orchestra struck up their overture as I was when that tiny five-piece circus band struck up theirs then and I was hoping to see ‘my’ tiger happy too.

The BBC Concert Orchestra, is not a ‘light’ orchestra and certainly not a lightweight one. They excel at twentieth century music like this Prom’s, and, as we have heard at previous Proms recently in other 20th century repertoire you might think more the province of the BBCSO or even the London Sinfonietta. And so they did in Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto with Michael Collins on clarinet. “Full,” he said it was, of rhythmic complexity and incredible colours.” And under Hazelwood’s direction, pared down to almost Weill-ian spareness and rhythms, every strand counting, so, so clearly, it was.

This was not Benny Goodman’s Ebony. Nor Woody Herman’s, of which, apparently, Stravinsky said all he could remember was the cigarette smoke: “They didn’t blow horns, they blew smoke . . .” Perhaps because smoking is completely banned in public buildings (one day I am going to get pneumonia through being forced outside with my cigarette) this was not a performance in a smoke-filled club. It was cabaret—and Cabaret—and aware of the desolate dawn hours when the audience has gone, the floorboards are sticky with spilt liquor, and the bleak unenticing 40-watt bulbs have replaced the glamorous glare of the spotlights and coloured floodlight gels.

I daresay you may think I have an overactive imagination—but isn’t music supposed to stimulate the imagination, unless it emanates from Darmstadt or IRCAM?—and I’m harping on this sort of thing too much, but this was not 1945, assuredly not Hollywood, but in its darker tones the pre-war decadent Berlin clubland of Christopher Isherwood. With the SA inside titillating their warped libidos, and outside drunkenly ready to smash windows and start fights. Very like our own dear London clubland in 2008.

Quite often, a Proms season develops an ethos around some works, quite independent of the different orchestras, conductors and soloists, and so one has developed this year. I have begun to feel this, and tried to express it, in more than one of the concerts recently. It must be some kind of influence in the atmosphere; I am sure the conductors don’t get together with the Proms director and discuss their interpretations in advance, nor with each other, but nonetheless it does happen.

So the second ‘blues’ movement, lightly syncopated, just off-the-beat, was edgier than the New Orleans funeral march superficially it might have appeared. There was a nervous, fractious Mac-the-Knife sharpness to it that might have been the sound of jackboot s and marching, and red flags tearing too.

And so, in the last movement as the clarinet darkened ominously, after the almost elegiac and sombre beginning somehow the Ebony Concerto found itself, finally, in New York, not in Harlem, but somewhere under the night-time shadow of the Chrysler Building and the lights of the Empire State. (With a suggestion King Kong and Fay Wray might be on top, if you could only see through the rising steam from the sidewalk grids.) it was firmly rooted in the jazz inventors and all their migrations to and from Louisiana, Chicago, and New York in those fifty preceding years.This was a unique performance.

Though when Collins said “we should hear more of it” he meant the Concerto itself (and I have loved it for years—I discovered it via jazz, not classical music—and felt the same, and never understood why we don’t) he wasn’t expecting us to come back again to his, the BBCCO’s and Hazelwood’s, I shall.

I can’t really take Bernstein’s ‘Prelude, Fugue and Riffs’ on any level other than as a jeu d’esprit combined with a sort of ‘Young Person’s Guide to the Jazz Age”, and again, that confounded ‘Stripper’ sneaks in . . . I’d either forgotten, or others fade down the spotlights for those bars, but perhaps they should have thrown it a dressing gown or something and rushed it off stage.

But the BBCCO managed to combine, again, a touch of Weillian sparseness in the ‘prelude’ (brilliant, risky, use of mutes, and the hell with the size of the Albert Hall and whether the people up in the gods would have heard that at all!*) with vivid colours in a really glorious ‘fugue’, joyous ‘riffs’ and an incredibly spirited no-holds-barred big-band ending. Superb performance: it came closer than I ever imagined to conning me into taking it as real jazz in places.

Over Gershwin’s American in Paris, I shall not be shamed. Why shouldn’t I love it? Pace David Gutman’s notes it is a little shining diamond, still shiny after 80 years—80 years!—and diamonds can be flawed and still worth showing off, can’t they? The notes, by the way—it’s a bit of a cheat, really, but it is handy—quote Gershwin’s own ‘programme’ for it, so I’ll steer clear of that.

Despite a vivacious ‘Moulin Rouge’, beginning, there were some horrid blunders in it, and it took quite a few bars for the band to recover and get a grip again. (See my note at the end of this piece**.) Like true pros, they did, however, with the soloists doing a very ‘jazzbo’ job of it, the band even allowing themselves an utterly unashamed blatant (you could see Katie Courie’s lower lip wobbling) sentimentality in the ‘homesickness’ part. It might get it sneered at in some quarters, but it was honest. No clever-clever irony here: there’s none in the score, after all.

If I’m going to be honest too, and I suppose I’d better be, it was a rather ‘Barnum and Bailey’ piece of musical theatre. But I did end up wanting to dance around the flat waving a feather boa (I’m a cripple now, so I can’t really, any more) but at least I could tap my feet, shake my shoulders and click my fingers in delight, and in time, all through the closing section. And as the horn’s last notes died away, my lower lip did a little Katie Courie wobble, I admit, until the band successfully got me grinning again with their hectic ‘mad-taxis-round-the-Arc de Triomphe’ ending. A lovely close to this ‘jazz age’ Prom.

R3 Relay

Prom 31: Gershwin: Strike up the Band; An American in Paris; Stravinsky: Ebony Concerto; Bernstein: Prelude, Fugue and Riffs.

* Actually, I’m just pandering to outdated prejudices, which some visiting conductors, soloists and orchestras still hold, despite, I presume, the Beeb’s engineers telling them it’s different now. They would have. Since the minor relocation of the flying saucers, the quietest ppp an orchestra is capable of can now be heard clearly up there, and pretty well everywhere else. Gerghiev,I think, was the first to make a trial of that in one concert. (He’s said to take an interest in the technical aspects, unlike many.) I wouldn’t have believed it (it would have been on the threshold of audibility anywhere) if I hadn’t been there.

**Sometimes, my theatrical past atavistically arising, I wish the BBC would borrow some West End stage hands. Some nights, like tonight, the stage-shifting (or rather instrument and music-stand rearranging) can be interminable, and it seriously damages the atmosphere. And, I think, can also unsettle the players, which might explain a few terribly clumsy bars in the American in Paris when the players lost it almost as badly as the audience had earlier which really made me wince.

Also tonight a producer’s worst nightmare came true. Somebody (who no doubt is still sobbing in chagrin in a dark secluded corner of the Albert Hall’s basement, and like Gerghiev when he disappears down there—apparently he’s got a passion for exploring the bowels of the place during the intervals—may not be retrieved for ages) left the soloist’s score backstage before the Ebony Concerto . . .

If you’re interested (but I dare say you aren’t) a good many years ago, I think in the 70’s, there was a discussion in Hi-Fi News about which recordings of An American in Paris had the most authentic period Parisian taxi horns. (I was reminded of this by the presenter telling us that the percussionists did a good impersonation of Parisian drivers, waving their horns volatilely in each others’ faces.) The answer, I seem to recall, was the Cleveland/Maazel on Decca. I couldn’t vouch for their authenticity tonight, I’m afraid, but they sounded OK to me.

An Enigma Wrapped in a Concert

2008-08-10T21:45:00.006+01:00

Much as I admire and am really grateful to the BBC for supporting composers when it is terribly difficult to get a new piece played here, let alone actually be paid for it, I didn’t really like Prom 33. Beecham joked once (yes, I know it's hackneyed, but there is still some truth in it) “the English don’t really like music, they just like the noise it makes.”

Maybe because I’m only half-English (despite the name, shan’t tell you what the other half is, you’ll have to guess) I didn’t like the noise Gaudete made, especially early on. But then I’m a poetry sort of person so as a rule I prefer to read Ted Hughes. I did enjoy the musical connections in the first half, though; very clever, I thought. Keeps the brain occupied, even when the emotions might not be. I can see it deserved the applause, though.

I had found Michael Berkeley’s ‘Slow Dawn’ rather enigmatic; and the Enigma Variations, though a very traditional conception (a relief, no doubt, to all those who, wrongly, I think, hated the Elgar 1) was very well played. Now, I really must get back to my neglected pieces . . .And get some proper food into me, which I've been missing this weekend trying to catch up. Music may be the food of love, but even loving the Proms is turning out not to be sufficiently nutritious . . .

R3 Relay

(You'll see I've added a Google Search box for this blog over in the sidebar, since the 'Labels' list is getting rather unwieldy already, and is probably going to become even more so before we're finished, if it doesn't end up totally out of control. Hope it helps to track things down that might not jump out at you immediately, or you've mislaid.)

Messaien/Manchicourt: Club Mix (Prom 32)

2008-08-10T16:51:00.008+01:00

I wish, sometimes, the BBC wouldn't try to educate us quite so obviously. Like by interspersing Messaien's "Messe de la Pentecote" with Manchicourt's Missa Veni Creator Spiritus, which I'm listening to now. Fascinating it is, too, in some startling harmonic correspondences. And beautiful singing by BBC Singers and sensitive playing by James O'Donnell.

The trouble is, that to review each properly, I'm going to have to spend time editing my recording on my Mac separating the two—hello, BBC, we Prommers do have a long enough concentration span to have got the idea if you'd done it that way!—and as you'll have noticed by now, I'm getting a bit behind with some of the other stuff, so it'll have to wait, probably, until after the seven days allowed for listening to it on line are up.

But, if you didn't hear the live relay, get your mouse over to the Proms iPlayer when it's up and listen. You'll be well rewarded. Honest. Sneaky way as it may be to force people to listen to both Messaien and Manchicourt in one concert . . .Still, it's one way of doing it, and since I don't choose my concerts by century, or style, or (musical!) prejudice, but I know many do, I oughtn't to complain that the Beeb has to resort to this sort of trick.

(The presenter, delightfully, said "Messien is casting a long shadow over this Proms Season . . ." A bit too long, I think, but I don't think she quite meant it the way I took it.)

Prom 31: Smoochy-coochy

2008-08-10T01:23:00.002+01:00

I did wonder if I might have been spoilt for tonight’s ‘jazzy’ Prom, since I stayed up last night to listen to the real thing, as it were, the recording on R3 of the brilliant John Scofield Barbican concert from last year.

So that might be why I found Jason Yarde’s arrangement of Gershwin clever, but relatively unremarkable. And again, maybe I’m being unjust, but I wasn’t that enamoured of his own “Rhythm and Other Fascinations’, but perhaps that was the fault of the audience as percussionists. They were warned that if they didn’t follow the percussionists’ rhythm with their clapping, they’d destroy it.

They completely lost it, I don’t know how, considering quite a fair proportion are usually amateur musicians or music students, and did. I was joining in at home, fairly competently I thought, until then, and they completely threw me, too. I bet this is the first time you’ve read an audience being castigated for their performance at a Prom? (I’m not sure, but I think the R3 engineers attempted a panic-stricken but brave rescue operation by cutting some of the audience mics.) Audience participation without a lot of rehearsal at a Prom is always risky, as Maxwell Davies discovered one year at the Last Night. As they say, don’t call us . . .

Nor, I’m afraid, though all three new pieces were vastly superior to last night’s utterly trivial ‘Javelin’, was I much taken by the over-lush Symcock “Progressions’ , which didn’t seem to progress anywhere like as far as Gershwin, or more likely, Bernstein or Copland, might have taken something like that—and there were some very obvious bits of them and even the MJQ from way back in it when it wasn’t being rather self-consciously ‘big band’ and Ellingtonian.

Beautifully played by the BBC Concert Orchestra, however, and lots of nice twiddly bits on the piano, if you like that sort of thing. Much of the piano part, though, would be nicely at home on a certain American ‘hi-fi buff’s’ label (which I’d better not name for fear of being sued) whose catalogue I once described as ‘music for the sophisticated lift’ somewhere I was sure I wouldn’t be overheard by a lawyer.

And some would have been better placed as a part of a trio than trying to support scoring of this scale. It apparently started as “a three movement concerto, but began to develop”. Quite. Really much too long to support itself, so I’d say it was ‘overdeveloped’. Some composers don’t know when to stop, do they? Nor do some writers once they get going, so I shall hurry on to the Gershwin and the Bernstein . . .

R3 Relay

Prom 31: Jason Yarde (arr.) Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now”; Rhythm and other Fascinations; Gwylim Symcock: Progresssions for Piano and Orchestra.

War, and Rumours of War

2008-08-09T04:37:00.007+01:00

I remember saying to a friend after the second of two War Requiems at the Proms in quite short order (a heartbreakingly beautiful and emotionally draining, even at times terrifying, performance under Kurt Masur) that the way things were going, perhaps the BBC should make it an annual event.

Like the annual Beethoven Ninth. People, it seemed to me then, needed a reminder of what it is all like. What it does to people.

So I suppose there was a terrible inevitability in yet another war beginning almost while the RPO was playing Vaughan Williams’ “War Symphony”. If music could only affect politicians’ hearts as much as composers can affect their listeners’. If only they would listen to, and comprehend, either of those pieces. Then, perhaps, just perhaps, one day we may put an end to war?

Before the end of this season, who knows what other beasts will go slouching towards Bethlehem? Or, in words from another genre of music altogether, am I forever going to be crying despairingly “War? What is it good for?”

I shall need the uplift of many of the coming Proms programmes, now, I think. For I am of a generation that foolishly thought we could put an end to war. And yet I have known people who have died, and worse, been ‘disappeared’ in wars. I have known people who have been dispossessed and tortured in them and yet somehow have retained their humanity, have even been able to listen to the War Requiem.

I have even fought to save people from illegal imprisonment and subsequent murder in a civil war. And failed. But I am still proud of that hope I shared once with many others. It just seems such a long time ago, tonight. I once rang the 'Peace Bell' in Kyoto. Perhaps I should have tried to make it ring louder than I did.

(I think, perhaps, that what I feel was what was so lacking in tonight's Vaughan Williams Sixth. I had no patience, felt no commitment to listen to it to the end. Perhaps I'll return to it, listen to the repeat. But, then, perhaps I will play myself either the War Requiem or La Grande Messe des Morts instead.)

I heard, after I wrote this, an American 'thinktanker' saying "Russia is seeking 'regime change' in Georgia, which is clearly illegal under international law." Well, well. Fancy that. I laughed until I cried. Or the other way round.

And to those readers who may want to tell me music has nothing to do with politics, that has never really been true, from the Greek Chorus through the Norse Sagas and Anglo-Saxon epics, La Battaglia, Beethoven's Eroica (or Wellington's Victory) to the Death of Klinghoffer, and the songs of the Palestinian Intifada, now, has it?

Prom 30: Harlem TanzMuzik

2008-08-08T23:23:00.005+01:00

I hope Michael Torke’s ‘Javelin’ is the last we’ll hear of the Olympics around here. Programmatic spun sugar soundtrack music with occasional podium fanfares. Agincourt from Henry V made pretty-pretty. It was timed at 8 minutes, or a bit more than 3000m, but seemed to take as long as a marathon. “The Ravel of his generation” the presenter called the composer. What generation would that be, I wonder? Not one I’ve so far belonged to, or would want to in whatever future I have left.

We might, the same presenter said, in a cloyingly sing-song tone have heard the influence of John Adams. We might, I’m damned if I could. Not even out of ‘The Chairman Dances’ which the BBC’s National Orchestra of Wales played with true Swing style, if not quite Adams’s. It had a foot-tapping joyfulness, if rather played on a single level, and even if it did get a little confused in places, it was truly enjoyable. And downright great fun.

In her interview, Han-na Chang displayed an unnervingly ‘New Age’, unsophisticated and somewhat confused conception of Bernstein’s ‘Three Meditations’, showing a total failure to grasp the difference between irony and sarcasm, and whatever role the emotion of ‘bitterness’ might have in either. That probably explains why despite the orchestra’s attempts to get in a little of the atmosphere of West Side Story or On The Town as Indian raga and her competent playing, all three failed to be emotionally convincing or inspiring. Clearly, the soloist and orchestra were just not on the same wavelength, which after that interview didn’t surprise me.

Bernstein got into Ellington’s Harlem, too. Or at least his ‘Prelude, Fugue and Riffs’ got into the first bars, along with a rather unnerving touch of Gershwin. This had to be Kristjan Jarvi, pushing it, surely. As must have been the few bars ‘tribute’ to ‘The Stripper’? It’s a long time since I last heard Harlem, but I don’t recall those being that marked.

As it did in the John Adams, it turned out that the BBCNOOW could swing very nicely indeed, but I have heard it, if not sounding quite so much pure Ellington as they did in places (which I really loved!) a little less derivative as it did at times. The soloists were superb, especially the five saxes, the percussionists tremendously vivacious. The band was really on a roll by the end. I think Ellington would have engaged the lot of them on the spot. Great fun, again.

The audience cheered and stamped—I’m not surprised—and were rewarded by a raucous encore with the band going absolutely wild. (To the extent I wish they’d been allowed to let their hair down like that earlier.) That was almost the best part of the concert.

(And then, someone in the R3 presenter's suite, who'd obviously been listening, decided to keep up the mood before the late-night jazz programme, which it made a trifle late starting, with an amazingly rollicking Rimsky Cappricio Espagnole for piano duo . . .it's on Linn CD—probably the only time I'll give a nod to hi-fi here!—but obviously you all probably missed it and it's worth a try.)

R3 (relay)

Prom 30: Michael Torke: Javelin; John Adams: The Chairman Dances; Bernstein: Three Meditations; Ellington: Harlem

I never, ever, want to hear that presenter (Geoffrey Smith?) again. He may not have meant to, but he sounded patronising, and none of us need to be reminded twice before and three times after short pieces, that a Prom concert is coming from the Albert Hall. I think, three weeks in and thirty concerts, we’ve all just about grasped that. Anyway, on radio, why does it matter? And each time, he was nearly overtaken by the conductor’s up beat before he’d finished talking, which, as you know, I hate. I didn't count the number of times he mentioned the bloody Olympics, but it was too many.

New Composers: other, various, young

2008-08-08T21:53:00.004+01:00

There were far more interesting new compositions than Chen Yi's by young composers, one at least only 16, on R3 between Proms 29 and 30. On the iPlayer, or the R3 'Listen Again' page, look for 'BBC Proms Inspire Young Composers Competition', an uninspired title if ever there was one. But definitely worth listening to from the ten minutes I caught.

Olympic Fireworks and Damp Squibs

2008-08-08T19:16:00.016+01:00

I hadn’t intended to listen to Prom 29, for reasons that will shortly become obvious, but I cottoned on just in time that it would give me an opportunity both to let fly about a couple of other things, and, perhaps, keep this blog visible on Google searches amidst all the Olympics stuff. And this time I don’t care if I send enough tall poppies flying to set me up with a new career in the drugs trade.

I suppose commissioning a piece called “Olympic Fire” (there’s another one called “Javelin”, heaven help us, tonight—at least I presume that refers to the pointy thing people chuck about, rather than being an encomium to the Jowett) is the BBC’s attempt to create some kind of ‘relevance’ for the sportier types who might be tempted thereby to ditch the telly coverage of the four-yearly athletes’ drugstest in favour of a Prom or two. Sorry, I mean ‘sportsfest’. I think.

Which leads me to my first moan. Our ‘Unculture’ (whose name bears an uncanny resemblance to both the sharp implement and the vehicle) Minister, just before the Proms programming was made public, accused classical music (and the Proms, by implication, though later she denied it) of being “excluding” of various age groups and races. This, despite the wonderful Soweto Strings at last year’s Proms.

Classical music does not, any more than any other pursuit, “exclude” people. People exclude themselves. It’s something either you gain an interest in, hopefully with passion, or you don’t. I have never had any interest whatsoever in sport, although I was a passable sprinter in my early teens when I couldn’t avoid teachers bullying me onto the sports field. (I was never even that bothered about winning, even though I did sometimes, which, despite Baron de Coubertin, I gather is the main aim.) But I don’t feel ‘excluded’ from it. ‘Uninterested’ is the proper word. It’s just the amount of coverage it gets now on TV and radio and in the press makes me angry. And, come to think of it, ‘excluded’ but only in the sense I feel they feel I ought to be one of them.

I might as well complain to FIFA I am ‘excluded’ from football because they don’t play classical music at the interval, or whatever they call the space between the two halves. (Discounting Nessun Dorma, of course.) All this politician was doing, despite the hurt she caused, was trying to drum up a bit of coverage for a department that has, under her, collapsed even more into desuetude. And might have disappeared without trace, except that sport, god help us, is also under its umbrella. Catch the French (pre-Sarkozy, anyway, I wouldn’t be too sure now) doing that. But the side-effects are probably going to last for years.

The other reason for not intending to listen was Slatkin reappearing. I thoroughly disliked his tenancy (for in all honesty, that is all it amounted to) with the BBCSO, for reasons I won’t bore you with. A friend who was at his last concert with them told me she had never ever heard an audience apparently sound so relieved that the conductor of a major orchestra was departing. Privately, at home, I cheered. I would even have thrown 50p into his retirement fund collecting bucket, had there been one, to help pay the fare home. Preferably on a slow, uninsured-at-Lloyds, cargo boat.

(As Maggie Thatcher—who I also loathe, I might say, and not just for her ignorance of the arts, either— memorably said at her last appearance in the House of Commons, “I’m enjoying this!” I’d never have dared submit this for print; at least not in quite such unveiled terms.)

So, would Chen Yi's “Olympic Fire” have attracted any of the excluded sporty types, or was it just there as some kind of sop to its being Olympics year again, a futile PR attempt to get just one Prom concert a two-liner in the sport-obsessed media?

I doubt the first. Not unless they’d like a Pekin Opera version of Bernstein (or vice-versa) conducted as though it was a 100m sprint. I’m not sure who won, but I think it was a dead heat between the conductor and the RPO, with the composer falling out of the race very early on through injury. I hope. So I suspect PR. Which is why my review, too, is a two-liner. Despite the Proms audience who were obviously caught up in the mad rush. Of first-performance adrenalin only, I trust. I'd fail a drugs test at Door 8 of the Albert Hall if they ever bring them in; I have to take a morphia-derivative these days . . .

Olga Kern wore a red dress to the Albert Hall. To hide the blood? Slatkin came as "Flash Lenny." That's all, folks. Packed house (and you can take that which way you like) or not, the 'Rach & Pag' Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini was a comic strip performance.

(R3 Relay)

I did listen to the Vaughan Williams, but it's the interval piece on Dives and Lazarus, especially the woman folk singer in her 60's from forty years back, I'd choose to listen to again, and if it's on the BBC listings anywhere, I suggest you do too.

How long does ephemera last?

2008-08-08T13:21:00.011+01:00

Paul Daniel (late of ENO, that is; a magician in his way, of quite a different kind) wrote to a Proms blogger colleague recently. The substance is not relevant here, but he made one remark that has been niggling at me ever since:

“As performers we create the immediate, the temporary, and leave others the pleasure of picking over the results.”

Do you know, for all that’s been said to me before, I’m not sure it is entirely true? Admittedly, once upon a time I was rather shocked to find members of the orchestra, after what I thought was a stunning performance, heading for their hotel discussing anything but what they’d just amazed 6,000 people doing. It seemed more like factory workers going home from the car production line at Dagenham. A disappointingly industrial kind of outlook. But then, they do this every day. I would hear that concert just the once.

But that doesn’t mean that the performance, for all it might be a singularity, is going to be ephemeral in the way Paul Daniel’s remark seems to imply. Some concerts, some productions, are, of course.

I doubt very much whether many of the audience now remembers anything (or did even then for very long) about the stage productions I was once a humble ASM for. Goodness knows, I only have a hazy recollection of two of them, and that is probably only because I was a teenager with a crush on one of the actresses who was in one, and because the other was the first time I’d ever seen Godot live. I was given an afternoon off to see it from the front for a change . . .I was innocent then; it wasn't entirely generosity, or concern for my dramatic education. I was a bit more 'papering' for an undersold matinee, of course. And we didn't talk about it then in the pub either where we had our (after-hours, usually) break before striking the sets.

But some, for all that, do last in the memory; I’ve spoken to people who have been able to tell me in detail about Callas's performances at Covent Garden. I still have a vivid recollection of Tennstedt’s Prom Ninth: I wept over that, was convinced it was his swansong, the culmination of a life of unkind fragility, and sure enough, not long after, he did die. Whether there will be any of that calibre this season, it’s too early to say, but I am sure there will be one or two. And of course, there are some I've already almost forgotten.

While I agree that the performance on the night is temporary, is immediate, in that it will never be repeated—or at least we expect and hope not, though there are always ‘industrial production-line’ ones that are, played with all the individuality of interpretation of a West End musical score that has to sound the same every night, regardless of who’s playing the instruments—I can’t agree with the implication that it’s necessarily ephemeral. At least not in its effect.

(And of course, I wince rather at the implication I too am a vulture, even if a small one, though I’d agree that many music critics inhabit the same sort of locus. Can I be a carrion crow? At least they are handsomer.)

Photo by Kathy Chin

Prom 27: Bananas, Belle Epoque, and Waterlilies

2008-08-07T02:39:00.020+01:00

I think I can predict most reviewers' reactions* to this Prom's Bolero, that is, if any bother to do any more than dismiss it in a couple of lines. So I shall try to get my retaliation in first. Tonight's performance had much more substance than a mere ice lollipop handed out to the audience on a hot stifling evening to thank them for sitting (or standing) through the serious stuff.

It actually made, as these programmes sometimes (and sometimes very mischievously) do, connections (musical, I mean, not ideological) with what had gone before that you don’t expect: most obviously in a kind of temporal or epochal consanginuity with the Stravinsky, but also with Benjamin’s own piece which I'll write about later. His decision to follow the Pavane pour une infante defunte directly without a pause, which might have appeared whimsical, actually did make contextual sense.

Benjamin set that neatly in a pre-war decade, before the world lost both its innocence and its money for the first time, or so people once said, as it has again all too many times even in George Benjamin’s lifetime.

It was clear that he and the BBCSO were mentally and emotionally in France, and not even within sight of the Spanish border. There was nothing of Velasquez here; there was the delicate colouring of a Monet watercolour in the strings and the harp, backlit with flashes of the richer colouring and fleshiness of a Renoir nude in sometimes very darkly coloured strings.

This, you had the feeling, was une infante who had an inkling she was destined to become defunte later in that equally drug-riddled, psychologcally edgy era of the kind we think we’ve invented that was also the belle epoque—and was dancing away her last years of adolescence. It was a very stylish, beguiling, knowing, cleverly constructed performance.

And now forget (please, it’s about time we, or at least we the Brits did) that ice skating Bolero that’s blighted the poor orphaned thing again for the last umpteen years. Benjamin’s was well into the post war belle epoque this time, but with the crash impending any moment: no flossy evocation of prancing wasp-waisted, slim-hipped matadors, this was cigarette factory sex, bosoms, Josephine Baker and sultry dancing in skirts made of bananas.

At times it was so sensuous, thanks to the swaying smoky jazz cafe woodwinds with their clever touch of syncopation, you could have rolled cigars on its thighs. It was the jazz era hitting Paris—as interpreted by Gertrude Stein.

Robert Maycock of the Independent wrote in the notes “all that happens in Boléro, apart from the big harmonic surprise close to the end, is that a pulse continues unchanged, and alternating melodic lines return in changing orchestral colours. On another, Ravel lavished all his sophisticated skill on making a substantial, perfectly timed form out of these few dimensions. You just try making a crescendo build for 10 minutes.” Benjamin had no diffculty at all with that; he made it sound simple.

And it was tense, a tension that increased relentlessly almost bar by bar until its climax. And, probably, had they heard this performance, also that of both Alice B Toklas and Gertrude Stein.

But it was the jazz-influenced orchestral colours of both the woodwind and the brass that made it sound as though there was a lot more happening than usual; some of those melodic lines suddenly and unexpectedly growling threateningly and anguished out of the brass section like a very big Parisian Apache with a knife looming out of the back door of a subterannean club in a dark Parisian alleyway . . . There was a strong hint of that dark underbelly of the period that Cocteau lived in in that.

Someone, whose name I missed because I had my head in the fridge looking for some ice for my whisky, commented in the interval that George Benjamin has an impeccable sense of pace, and doesn’t he just. It must be the envy of a good many far more experienced conductors.

And that, if you want to get back to the way Ravel probably thought of it at the beginning before he practically obliged himself to disown it, is just what the Bolero must have as a base to lift it from the banal rigmarole it so often has become. No way would Ravel have made the complaint he did to Toscanini that it was too fast. The acceleration was perfection.

You can tell me I’m just a kid still, if you want, I don’t damn well care, but I found tears of sheer joy running down my cheeks listening to this Bolero, and I'm not at all surprised that both the audience and the conductor were wearing grins as broad as Josephine Baker's hips when the applause and cheers erupted.

It was one of those prom endings that sends you away happier, or at least reassured, with life; even when, as with tonight’s other pieces either side of the interval, you have also felt the fingers of its traumas counting down your vertebrae and pausing ominously one handspan to the left, and wonder what it’s all really for. Even the weather gods must have felt something of all that; in the minutes after the concert ended the darkening violet London sky over Kensington was lit up with vivid flashes of lightning.

There is some Messaien, like some Boulez, I just cannot manage, try as I might, and believe me, I really have tried over the years. The orchestral L’Ascension is one I’ve had to give up on. It struck me that Benjamin was conducting it more as a pupil of Alexander Goehr than as a Messaien accolyte, but other than that I will leave it to Evan at PromsAmerica, Classical Iconoclast or Boulezian to give you a better insight than I can into how it went.

The Prommers (and the BBCSO through the season) have a few conductors they fall in love with and hug to their hearts. When you’re in the hall, the feeling is tangible even before the concert starts; and if you listen to the broadcast recording, you’ll sense it even in that, because George Benjamin is one of them. John Adams, any American readers might be surprised to hear, is another.

(I do hope I don’t get into Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner with my cigar-rolling metaphor or Gertrude Stein. . . If you don’t believe me about this, and I can tell already you probably don't, you still have six days to catch this Prom on the iPlayer. Listen to it all the way through, but ignore the couple of accidental squeaks from the horns in the Bolero—it was a hot, humid, muggy night and the stage lights would have been very hot on them by then, none of that good for horns—in one bar, they don’t matter.)

* My predictions don't always come true. At least Andrew Clements in The Guardian didn't write it off, and nor did Neil Fisher in the Times, so there's hope yet. . . My crystal ball must have gone out of tune. I did use an A=440 tuning fork last time, didn't I?

(R3 relay)

Prom 27: Ravel: Pavane pur une infante defunte, Bolero

A matter of presentation

2008-08-06T20:33:00.005+01:00

I'd meant to comment on this before, but forgot. Just to show I am capable of giving praise where it's due, I am very grateful to the R3 presenters this year for allowing us to appreciate a sensible amount of the audience applause before they interrupt after a piece has finished.

There have been innumerable episodes in the last couple of seasons where they have started talking almost before the conductor had lowered his arm, which is as infuriating listening at home as it is to hear some members of the audience's premature applause in the hall.

And, just as important, they are again paying attention to the conductor's and R3 producer's cue lights, so so far this year I haven't heard some idiot still finishing a (usually unimportant) sentence as the performance begins. Someone has finally realised there is enough ambient sound from the auditorium for us to recognise that the broadcast hasn't broken down. If we listeners can cope with four minutes of John Cage's silence, we can manage 10 or 20 seconds of Albert Hall's.

But I still have a gripe. Why should we be told, for instance, Caroline Widmann's 'emerald green dress' complemented 'her red hair'? The Albert Hall doesn't have a catwalk during the Proms season, at least not so far; and even though radio has no colours, do we need to know that? Since I have worked for a fashion magazine in my time (though not, obviously, as a concert reviewer) would you —or maybe the BBC would— like me to do a few fashion/couturier pieces in this blog while I'm at it?

Le Cirque du Son

2008-08-06T15:59:00.011+01:00

The Stockhausen night, regrettably, was the other concert apart from the Glyndebourne that I couldn’t go to last week. Unfortunately, pain rather took over, too much for me to really be able to cope with two long concerts, even lying flat on my back in the Gallery, especially as I would have wanted to stay on for the Stimmung.

That meant, of course, that I couldn’t hear Cosmic Pulses in the ‘surround sound’ it obviouly required. Apparently at home we heard the “CD” version, whatever that was. I am entirely uncertain as to whether that was some previous recording or a different stereo mix-down. Or even whether it was recorded on the same day. Very annoying, as anything I write about it might not correspond at all with what I might have heard in the hall.

The presenter apologised for the BBC not being able to broadcast Surround Sound, although I know some years ago the BBC was certainly experimenting with recording it. Whether the experiment was abandoned (Dolby Labs licence fees have often proved a stumbling block) I don’t know, but maybe a surround sound version may just one day turn up on the cover of the BBC Music magazine? Yes, I do realise that it has the same commercial value, and probably even less popular appeal, as producing cloned Dodos for battery farming their eggs, but you never know.

There were two other minor irritations; I tend not to listen to the presentation pieces, but apart from that, I believe I heard the reason for playing Gruppen twice. I should say ‘half heard’. It sounded a little disingenuous, rather as though the idea might be “Since you didn’t like it the first time, we’ll play it again so you can not like it all over again.”* Rather like the EU Commission’s reaction to a “No” vote on a constitution, I thought. I might be doing the Albert Hall audience an injustice; though I thought the applause at first was tentative and uncertain, it did seem to become gradually more enthusiastic. I also know, however, from being there on these sort of occasions, enthusiasts like me can clap louder and harder if the others are jibbing a bit . . .

The other remark I found a little odd was an expression of surprise that Stockhausen included an electric guitar in an ensemble 50 years ago. If he’d been Carl Dolmetsch I might have accepted that, but for someone who was interested in sound manipulation, and was in his (late) twenties, I’d have been much more surprised if he hadn’t discovered the instrument by then. What different and isolated worlds some classical people live in—still—compared to the rest of us who were brought up with rock and roll and punk or even house, garage and rap as well as classical music. . .

And there, of course, is the great gulf fixed. Not being there, I couldn’t know how many fans of Brian Eno, Frank Zappa (post the Mothers, I mean) even Gary Numann, or that much more recent German group (whose name escapes me, yet again, but means something like ‘turning it all inside out and putting it together again’ **) might have turned up to either Stockhausen concert, but much as I would say they ought to be a natural constituency, somehow I bet they didn’t.

Anyway, I am a part of his natural constituency ever since I discovered Zenakis and branched out from him years and years ago; and I don’t think—going back to the pre-concert chatter, again—vague New Age bleatings about cosmic whirlings and spinnings are anything other than patronising about a composer (and why on earth still "challenging"?) who’s been around for more than half a century.

That was a long (only in hours, not in any other way!) and glorious Prom night. One of my favourites so far this Season.

And, since I am getting a bit behind with the reviews, in the meantime I recommend you to two other enthusiasts, Classical Iconoclast and Boulezian.

*I remember Charles Groves conducting the BBCSO in Maxwell Davies’ cheeky ‘Foxtrot for Orchestra’ on a tour of Germany years ago. It was booed and hissed with a vehemence I thought only the La Scala audience was capable of. Wonderfully, Groves turned to the audience and said: “Since you liked it so much, we’ll play it again.” And did.

** I got there eventually, after being mentally bogged down with ‘Bauhaus’ and 'Einsatsgruppen’, and stuff, so I’m not quite brain dead yet: Einsturzende Neubauten is what I was after . . .

The foggy, foggy dew

2008-08-05T23:27:00.011+01:00

There is nothing, nothing, like one of the Proms' late-night vocal concerts to send you out into the night close on to midnight cheerful enough to withstand a half-hour wait (after you've just missed the night bus in Kensington Gore and ought to feel bloody about it) pouring rain, getting home in the early hours, and leave you still capable of believing you'll enjoy getting up at seven in the morning.

I daresay some will whinge about the "Uncle Tom Cobley and all" aspect, or folkiness, of the programme for Prom 26, judging from some of the reactions to the 'Folk Day'. But if you are incapable of laughing helplessly at the Kings Singers' (or more properly Gordon Langford's) dramatisation of Widdecombe Fair, and wouldn't want to do a pretend Morris Dance, or get together with another five people on their way home to try your hand at it, afterwards, all I can say is you have no soul.

OK, yes, I was a folky once; complete with beard (but not the sweater and I have never ever worn sandals and socks together) so you can say I'm biased. Or susceptible. But there was, as this Prom showed, an essence of a folk tradition that ran through Lassus. Poulenc, right through to the Victorians, sung without a single trace of nacreous sentimentality. And the purity of the McCabe piece was somehow perfectly appropriate after the early renaissance French songs.

And at nearly midnight, how else could you end a long concert of fun, seriousness, solemnity and the rollicking humour of ordinary people's lives, spread over half a millennium except by a touching but still unsentimental 'The Long Day Closes' as an encore?

I have always loved these late night vocal programmes, so often with what turns out to be an unexpectedly appropriate and thought-inducing mix of what at first sight seems bizarre and mistaken, right from when they started. In those days, while the audience was large enough to have been respectable in a small hall, but was barely visible in a space meant for 6,000, we were all called down from our scattered places around the Albert Hall to be upgraded to the very comfy swivelling Business Class seats around the Arena. It's a bit different now . . .

If you missed it, or thought it was just another vainglorious programme not worth taking seriously, try it via the BBC's iPlayer, I urge you. And it's on BBC4 on the 1oth. I'll write it up fully shortly, when I've had chance to digest the America deserta properly.

And good lord—the Kings Singers have been doing this now for forty years? I hadn't realised they'd become an institution . . . Funny; they never sound like one . . .

(R3 Relay)

Prom 26, Kings Singers

Prom 25: Dutch Courage

2008-08-05T21:53:00.011+01:00

I hadn’t intended to listen at all seriously to Prom 25, but put down my book within a few bars of the opening of the Brahms Violin Concerto. I am not keen on violinists who rise to prize-winning stardom and vociferous publicity before they reach puberty, but Julia Fischer must be in her mid-twenties now, and played the Brahms with elegant stylishness, and a superb sweet and rounded tone. I thought her phrasing was perfectly judged and the cadenza delightful.

And that was after a Dvorak 6 from the Netherlands Philharmonic under Yakov Kreizberg that was well-paced, technically very well-played, but not stong on interpretation, and one, while probably enjoyable in the hall, as these performances often are, was never going to count as one of my great long-lived Prom concert memories.

In a way, it was just that, by juxtaposition, that made Fischer’s performance particularly striking. Competent and obviously enthusiastic, a very well-drilled ensemble as the NPO obviously is in these pieces, nonetheless, Kreizberg produces a somewhat gruff impression, which threw Fischer’s violin strongly into the limelight against a rather industrial sounding accompaniment, so in lieu of hearing her with a world-class orchestra, I’ll reserve judgement on her interpretational abilities.

(The first piece was one of those things I always like at the Proms; something I'd never hear of otherwise and that does take a bit of courage to propose for a programme. Patriotic fun for the Dutch orchestra, but a sub-Straussian curiosity really is all the Wagenaar ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ Overture is. An overture to all the snortings, sneezings and trumpetings that probably emanated from M de Bergerac’s famous nose on occasion. Still, if anyone ever asks, I can at least say “Ah, yes. The Wagenaar Overture. I’ve heard that . . .” and now I can even pronounce the name properly. Do you think anyone will? I’m getting older; I can’t wait forever.)

There does seem to be an awful lot of young prize-winning violinists about these days, enough to form an entire orchestra section. If not two or three. Can we really support that many soloists? Shouldn't more youngsters be encouraged to take up other instruments? Who was the last 13 year old tuba player to get a dozen prizes?

(R3 Relay)

Among others, Fischer won an award from Gramophone.

Prom 25: Wagenaar; Dvorak Symphony No 6; Brahms Violin Concerto.

Charged with Assault with a Deadly Toothbrush

2008-08-05T05:14:00.003+01:00

Or Dame Ethel Smyth would have been, if she were still alive, very likely. This is what the London Times critic wrote about her Concerto for Horn and Violin (see my rather longer review below):

"Its grand gesturing and bandstand jocularity made one wish that Smyth had for once confined her championing of the female muse to the political arena."

And the same critic could write of those burgher-bellied, horse-hair padded Henry Wood orchestrations that "the Albert Hall thrilled yet again to his glorious magnification of the master" (Bach, of course) and "Rachmaninov's Prelude in C sharp minor . . .sounded, in the hands of the BBCSSO, like a soundtrack for the Kraken rising from the deep." True enough, I suppose: the Kraken was a monster that terrified seamen, much as that 'version' should have chased the denizens of the Albert Hall to seek refuge in the bars in horror.

News International paid for that summary of a rare concerto performance that probably took the soloists weeks to learn and rehearse . . .and which, apart from being superbly performed, was an original composition, whatever your view of its rank, not a re-rendering of another's.

Why, I wonder, do I and just a few others on the internet bother? Why concentrate hard and sweat over a bloody review for two hours, and go to bed at two in the morning, for nothing? And this is from a major music critic of the British national press. I think you can grasp why I lost any respect for its music criticism years ago.

What angers me even more, is that the same critics who make perfunctory, simplistic, and even mean-spirited judgements often seemingly for the sake of a cheap laugh, are the same people who deafeningly bewail the fact that fewer and fewer people show an interest in classical music, and classical record sales are declining.

Well, if they cannot engender some interest or enthusiasm themselves in a performance (and of something that has been recorded too, a CD that no-one who read that review would ever buy, reducing classical sales by yet another few dozen tenners) and constantly opine that most of what they hear is worthless anyway, how can that be a surprise?

(So I needn't hang around waiting for your call, then, Mr Times Music Editor? Sir?)

Prom 24: There is nothing like a Dame . . .

2008-08-05T01:07:00.019+01:00

I am sure Ethel Smyth would not be turning in her grave so much as hurling lid, nails and shovelfuls of earth about in her eagerness to get at the mysogenist ‘music critic’ who wrote this —which I found on the internet: “She composed a rather anaemic Concerto for Horn, Violin and Orchestra in 1927 trying to imitate the lyrical Brahms . . .”

Tasmin Little, I’m sure too, would have something vocal to say about that nonsense. From the performance perspective rather than the feminist one, at least so I imagine, since last time I had a pint in the pub with her and her husband neither Mrs Pankhurst nor Germaine Greer happened to crop up in the conversation. (I can’t drop many names, so you’ll let me off, won’t you, this time?) Metaphorically, in Prom 24, she chained herself to the musical railings in full wholehearted support of Dame Ethel.

As far as ‘modern’ English composers go, especially female ones, Dame Ethel is perhaps a little too early for me; I haven’t really ventured further back than Elizabeth McConchy, and I can’t say I made much at all of listening to bits of The Wreckers years ago, but I regret, hearing this performance, not having paid more attention to her before the 150th anniversary of her birth.

I have always admired Tasmin Little’s ability to burrow into the essential heart of a piece and then to stretch its sinews and muscles until it snaps into resolute perfection, let alone her seemingly easy way of learning, and then championing in her playing, relatively obscure or underplayed compositions, though heaven knows, there’s a very tough self-discipline gained at the Menuhin school that underlies that. I only wish she appeared much more often at the Proms instead of all those teenybopper technically perfect, but emotionally absent, Suzuki school violinists we so often end up with.

Smyth, in her Concerto, Little is quoted as saying, after an initial hint at Brahms, "goes off into her own sound world” (to me, for tantalising moments, tangentially closer to Les Six and Honnegger rather than early twentieth century Austria or Germany). “The music is meaty and expansive, with attempts to do something radical.” Exactly what that radicalism is, is not so easy to describe, but Little and Richard Watkins played in such close companionship and created such tension, it was unmistakeably there. It is by no means just the pretty piece that Andrew Achenbach might like us to believe from his Prom notes.

The first movement, the Allegro moderato, introduces all the strands that then wind themselves as strongly as an anchor chain through the two following movements. Underneath snatches of haunting lyricism and dance-like passages from the violin, there is a brooding presence emphasised turn and turn about by violin and horn. Little created the initial tension in this movement with a harder tone than I expected from her, but one that set the scene perfectly for the Adagio.

This second movement is termed “Elegy (in memoriam)”, but for whom or for what, I have to admit I do not know. But in terms of Little's and Watkins’ performance, any biographical detail was rendered irrelevant. For all the springing dancelike melody in the middle, this again had a looming, almost threatening tone, before a return to an earlier theme from the first movement, a presence that inescapably reminded you of the Somme and the horrors of WW1, achieved with surprising complexity, and technical difficulty, in the passages between horn and violin. There was some inkling here of Vaughan Williams but with the iciness of the Sinfonia Antartica, not the pastoral mode.

And then the amazing allegro. Rolls of worrying timpani and hunting calls from the horn , not the cheery View Halloa of English huntsmen in pink coats, but transformed into miltary calls. Or the horn calls of men who hunt, if not other men, at the very least wolves or bears. Followed by a reiteration of the dance liketheme from earlier, in a saoring duet between horn and violin that was both almost vocal and dramatic, theatrical and operatic, tender and harsh, moderated by gentle, barely audible chords from the harp, until you can no longer be sure whether the horn or the violin is the real protagonist, and the last strains of dance and the final orchestral chords end the movement.

This concerto, as it was performed on Monday night, did indeed possess an unexpected radicalism, emphasised by the tautness of the soloists’ phrasing and above all by the sheer tension they created between them. It spoke of a depth of concentration and commitment, of thoughtfulness and imagination that made this a thoroughly fascinating and absorbing, and even unexpectedly challenging piece. It is all too easy to imagine how in less committed hands it could end up as a rather flimsy sub-Brahmsian ‘English’ piece of fluff. (And how Dame Ethel the Suffragette would have growled at me for the implications of that phrase!) But after this, it cannot ever now be played so it sounds even palely "anaemic" (I hope) without arousing sheer derision.

The applause was enthusiastic, and deservedly so. My last note as I tried to absorb this superb performance was just “Wow!” I’m afraid Dame Ethel might not quite approve of that as a final judgement, but if she’s reading this somewhere, I hope she’ll forgive me. I’m likely to have enough problems in the afterlife without her going after me with the sharp end of a broken baton as well . . .

(R3 relay) Prom 24: Dame Ethel Smyth, Concerto for Horn and Violin

I'm probably angrier about this than either Tasmin Little or Richard Watkins will be; I know very well they get used to it and shrug it off, but it is just yet another clever-clogs piece of fatuity. And it's the kind of writing that used to mean I —as a reviewer well out of the mainstream—meant I had to constantly almost re-audition myself every time I met a performer in case I turned out to be someone who would do that kind of thing. I'm amazed now I think about it that so many have treated me so well when they are up against this kind of thing.

Photo of Dame Ethel in, shall we say, "challenging" mood and fetching tam o'shanter, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph website.

A bum note . . .

2008-08-04T22:36:00.004+01:00

Can I be the only one who is finding the Prom Notes on the Proms website all too often either too uninformative or just unhelpful? Or even sometimes simply casual and poorly researched? That trend was terribly obvious last year, but I had hoped it wouldn’t continue.

I had also hoped that casual proofreading might have been cured, too. I didn’t know that the famous altercation in Adrian Boult’s dressing room in 1930 was between him and a ghostly Ethel Smyth. She died in 1924, according to the BBC’s header, which also means she somehow transmitted her manuscript of the Horn and Violin Concerto posthumously, which would be really noteworthy.

And I do understand the pressures of writing to meet a midnight deadline, and of only having 300 or so words available, but I’m giving up on the English national newspaper Prom reviewers, who seem too often to be equally uninformative, or worse, uninformed. Or cannot actually write a succinct review in that many words instead of simply offering a broad-brush opinion.

A sign of the times, I suppose, that editors cannot spare even a full column for a Prom, or even classical music, review any more.

I reneged on my promise to myself, because I got curious, and checked out this. See what I mean? If I were Ms Smyth I know where I'd put that toothbrush . . .

Nil nisi bonum . . .

2008-08-04T22:32:00.004+01:00

I know, I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but why did we have to listen to two of Henry Wood’s own pieces in Prom 24? He is dead and buried, and I thought his ‘re-arrangement’ of the Bach Toccato and Fugue in D minor had been too. Certainly, the BBC Scottish did a commendable job of pretending to be the Albert Hall organ, but I would have far rather heard it on that.

And the orchestration of Rachmaninov’s Prelude certainly belonged somewhere amongst the gloomier overgrown and forgotten mausoleums of Kensal Green Cemetery. It is a very heavy, ‘muggy’ arrangement. Unless, of course, Stefan Solyom and the BBCSSO had been affected by the muggy weather we’ve had here in London the last few days, and were oppressed by the threatening grey clouds that appeared by the interval.

I don’t want to sound too ungrateful, but we are grateful for HW’s institution, and we have celebrated its, and his, hundredths, before now, so I can only assume the Proms planners were relying on a rather tenuous linkage between him and Ethel Smyth as an excuse for some rather sloppy and questionable programming. We had far too much of that last year. Perhaps it was a leftover?

Mercifully, it was the Smyth Horn and Violin Concerto that made the programme memorable, with brilliant playing from Tasmin Little that I’ll be writing much more about shortly, I hope. I would have loved more, instead of the also rather heavy and muggy Rachmaninov 2.

The BBCSSO textures were too heavily Wood-influenced in the first movement, and it was obvious throughout the first and fourth movements that they, or Solyom, cannot do ‘lush’ and ‘rich’ which is what I assume they were aiming for. The second was lighter and tauter, and there were pleasant lighter lyrical touches in the third, let down by some leisurely patches that were too near somnambulance for my liking. Despite a suddenly vigorous conclusion, it was one of those Rachmaninov performances where the listener mentally reaches the end a good ten minutes before the orchestra does.

Note to planners: Proms audiences don't really need 'sweeties' to sugar the hour and a half around an unknown, or scarcely known piece. Or are you thinking a little too much of the international audience on the internet now?

Before anyone says anything, I can see I have poppy petals all over my jeans, and I won't forget to shake the seeds out of my trainers . . .But if you prefer indiscriminate gushing enthusiasm in all your reviews, you could desert me and go here . . .

(R3 Relay) Prom 24 Bach, orch. Henry Wood: Toccata and Fugue in D minor; Rachmaninov, orch. Henry Wood: Prelude in C sharp minor; Rachmaninov (orch. Rachmaninov): Symphony No 2 in E minor

Prom 18: A Blood-spattered Coronation

2008-08-04T00:42:00.007+01:00

Il Coronazione di Poppeia

When Glyndebourne go to the Proms, it’s always a lively occasion. I’m sure half the celebratory anticipation is due to the simple fact over a thousand of us can get in for about a fiver, which wouldn’t even pay for the cheapest public transport to the opera house, let alone even a sandwich when you're there.

It means the audience will forgive a lot. Particularly that Glyndebourne singers are never first rank, or, to be honest, even second, for example. But they always make up in infectious enthusiasm and commitment, and, what is still a rare sight in some places, they act. (They act with their voices, too . . .) That is presumably why the Glyndebourne Proms, for all they are described as “semi-staged” are now as near as dammit fully staged, just with fewer props and no stage sets or prosc arch.

I remember the first time they came to the Proms, when they were supposed to be doing a ‘concert performance’, but quite simply forgot not to move; so well before half-way through the first act they’d all lapsed into acting as though they were on the Glyndebourne stage, and some of them nearly fell off the platform onto the Arena audience.

So I would probably have been a little more enthusuastic if I’d watched rather than just listened, for all that latterly the Glyndebourne productions have come unnervingly close to a send up. I suspect this time there may well have been some fancy near-slapstick antics going on around the bathtub, judging from the occasional laughter. But then, live, it usually works.

But listening, I’m a little less forgiving, and I found there is quite a lot in both the Times and Guardian’s critics’ reviews of Poppeia at Glyndebourne I agree with; but there was rather more than just ‘ditzy bottom-waggling’ to Danielle de Niese’s Cleopatra in Julius Caesar in 2005. (A friend and I can still do our version of the wonderfully funny but also threatening ‘confrontational gavotte’ between her as Cleopatra and Sarah Connolly as Caesar.) I can’t help thinking someone here is trying to avoid mentioning that at least a little of the frisson she engendered might not have been just through her voice, but have been helped along by her being sexy enough to get away with being both braless and (I think) knickerless under a translucent gown. At least at the Albert Hall.

The singing this time was simply glorious, and, as I’ve come to expect from the Glyndebourne, intensely dramatic. There was the smell of menace, casual evil, threat, corruption and blood from the very beginning. None of which could have ben unfamiliar to Monteverdi in Venice. It was, after all, the Venetians who lived with the constant threat of anonymous denunciations slipped into the mouth of the lions, who invented the art of ‘disappearing’ people who later turned up strangled in the street with no explanation. And all the Italian city states had their own histories of devious, vicious, cruel, bloodthirsty, murderous and every now and then downright mad rulers who might occasionally have surprised Nero. All the Glyndebourne cast captured this sanguine emotionally charged atmosphere superbly. There were duets that were simply scary.

Contrary to one critic, I thought Danielle de Niese’s Poppeia was superbly coloured and rich, full of character, whether her register might be entirely historically accurate for a Montevedi opera or not. What can’t be was her somewhat melodramatic vibrato, something which cropped up elsewhere incongruously, vocal slippage which I can only think must be down to the musical director.

I am not so sure about Alice Coote’s Nero; another critic noted a certain shrillness, which I thought distractingly prevalent, and occasionally bitter, even strained at times, in this performance. There are other, and better, ways of implying neuroticism. Not that the Neumann mics the BBC uses help, it must be said. And among the ‘major’ characters, Tamara Mumford (Octavia) turned in a star performance, excellently nuanced, characterful again, with a splendid emotional range that almost had me in tears at times. Both she and Alice Coote must have had the Albert Hall audience gasping for breath at times, I’m sure.

What I cannot be forgiving about is the musical direction of Emmannuelle Haim. For all I would applaud using a minimal chamber-sized ensemble, for the life of me I could barely recognise any authentic Monteverdi, even allowing that the score has been ‘recreated’ anyway. Musically, the tempi were plodding and invariable, many passages merely repetitious with little attempt at variation. Much struck me as being played more as though it belonged to the early Cinquecento not the Seicento, while one dance tune was played more like a stately18th century gavotte than anything of its real era and a little jig cropped up more than once that was more Susato than anything from the near mid-1600’s Italy.

I am just not keen on French styles of ‘early music’ performance; they have practically stifled Handel’s oratorios and operas in France, to the extent very few there grasp our current enthusiasm for their revivals on this side of the Channel. We in Britain have been taught forms of playing much more various, daring, and, dare I say it, lively, even sometimes challenging, over the forty years or so since David Munrow and Alfred Deller. To be blunt, William Christie’s own Les Arts Florissants (with whom I discovered later, Haim spent a decade) seldom enthuses me with anything more than mildly academic appreciation, for all the success of the Handel in 2005 with the OAE, and Marc Minkowski’s egotistical revisionism of Rameau at last year’s Proms was one of the worst examples of pretentiousnous.

Haim, in this oeuvre, it seems to me, failed to come to terms with its possibilities and left it a fossil, as though she was unwilling to deviate any distance at all from the surviving bass line in terms of scoring, and certainly not in imagination. Her own harpsichord continuo was percussive, merely twiddly and barely more than decorative; a series of Grinling Gibbons carvings, with little to do with Venice.

I have heard the OAE play with vastly more engagement and panache, particularly with a Prom audience before them, than they showed for more than a very few sparse bars under her direction in Poppeia. It was the soloists who were left to carry the performance by default, and that, in Monteverdi, is just not enough to be entirely plausible. I don’t think I’ve ever been so unenthused by Monteverdi’s music. Perhaps, as she was hinting in an interview, she would do better with ‘authentic’ Mozart, though I doubt I shall want to listen to it.

(R3 Relay) Prom 18: Monteverdi, l'incoronazione di Poppeia, Glyndebourne Opera

(This is on the iPlayer list, in two parts, rather widely separated for some odd reason. Sadly, there won't be an afternoon repeat, nor any video, which is really regrettable, presumably becasue of complications with royalties, residulas and contracts that would simply make it too expensive. Catch the audio while you can, if you didn't hear it the first time.)

Storms, teacups, vodka and moments of enlightenment

2008-08-02T02:46:00.000+01:00

Didn’t Roger Norrington start a storm? And all because he took the traditionalists’ vibrato away, hid it under the underwear in the bottom drawer and said maybe they oughtn’t to play with it anymore . . .

What some people seem to have forgotten, or would like to ignore, is that he, John Eliot Gardiner, and latterly Valery Gerghiev and Simon Rattle, have been coming along to the Proms for years now to challenge old fossilised ways of thinking about Classical music. And, because Proms audiences have proved extraordinarily receptive and even adventurous (albeit sometimes with a little prodding and pushing and now and then they can be a bit slow on the uptake) they often challenge their orchestras and the critics more than the prommers.

I remember going to ‘Early Music’ proms where the Albert Hall was barely a quarter full, if that, and we were all asked to huddle together in the posh seats so we looked like an audience instead of a random scattering of lost souls. Now they can put on early masses that are utterly esoteric, and Josquin, Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Handel are staples: and it’s packed out. And conversely, Boulez can now be just a little boring and dated and unchallenging . . .

I vividly remember the first ‘authentic’ Norrington Beethoven I heard there, in a hall that was only just half full. The concentration after the first few bars was intense, because we knew we were hearing something with almost as fresh untutored an ear as those who heard the first performance must have done. And we heard instrumental textures and interplay of themes we had never grasped quite so clearly before.

It dissipated any scepticism anyone except the most entrenched classical neanderthals had about ‘authentic’ Beethoven; and I admit that I had been one, until then, who had felt that the authentic revival really should stop around 17-something . . .

Gerghiev has done that to us with Prokofiev; even though his own Rotterdam orchestra admitted it was at a loss to grasp what he was up to, and were bemused by the prommers’ intensely silent concentration followed by an outburst of raucous applause and stamping. Just as, after that first Beethoven, any radio listener would have believed the Albert Hall was as packed tight as the black hole of Calcutta.

And in 2004, Simon Rattle stretched the Berlin there into the most extraordinary Beethoven 9, with a first movement played—and how sensible and obvious it seemed in context afterwards—as though it was by Haydn. And continued it into an orchestral battle between Sturm und Drang and Pure Romanticism that almost belonged a century later. In that one performance we grasped wholly, stunningly, and incontrovertibly the great arch Beethoven forms over the development of the symphony.

So, treasure that Norrington Elgar and forget the controversy, because that was one of those epiphanies that means I will forever think of a composer differently. As though, like Hans Richter, I had come across it for the first, unplayed, time.

And I don’t know that you will regularly get that experience, and know it is shared and understood by so many people, anywhere else but in a Proms season when it used to be something you might only be able to experience a few times in a lifetime. And a great deal more expensively.

Tall Poppy syndrome . . .

2008-08-02T01:11:00.001+01:00

I've been warned by a friend to beware what she calls the 'smug Londoner' syndrome. It's that rather tiresome "heard it, bought the T-shirt and it was all crap anyway" style of reviewing almost anything that's become prevalent here in the last few years. So I'm sorry if I do seem as though I'm part of that sometimes.

Still, I must admit this Proms season has a slightly discomfiting feel about it so far. We have been getting some rather 'traditional' programmes, and, alas, they have been not much to write home about, with some not very deeply considered conducting, and some rather average playing. And one particular oddity I simply cannot come to terms with, or grasp yet why I was so unaffected by it: Prom 8, the Obrecht and Josquin. I could not shake off the feeling that that was almost a fake. Or was it that it was performed in such an unusually cool almost off-hand Brechtian-alienated way that made me so uncomfortable with it? It wasn't like the Tallis Scholars and Peter Preston I thought I knew.

All the same, I know very well that the first half of the Proms season has often had makeweights in it over the last few seasons and it picks up in August, but there have been some spectacular and unexpected performances: the Haydn Cello Concerto, the Elgar 1 and the Stockhausen night to name my current three fave raves.

In Praise of the iPlayer and a little Peeve . . .

2008-07-23T00:11:00.007+01:00

Generally I only listen to the Beeb on my computer(s) under protest, but I had noticed that the sound quality of the BBC iPlayer (are they paying royalties to Steve Jobs?) is considerably in advance of Windows Media or RealPlayer. I thought, therefore. I ought to have a quick listen to one of the repeat Proms broadcasts via the website.

Unfairly, but in my erstwhile mean hi-fi reviewer mood, I picked the first Prom's Messaien on the Albert Hall organ (a very stiff test for any audio setup) and listened through the Sennheiser cans I use for audio editing hooked up to my Mac laptop. Oh, and yes, I have heard the organ live there since it was rebuilt, so I know what it's supposed to sound like.

It didn't do a bad job at all; there's obvious muddle in the treble and midrange when the score gets even remotely complex, and while the bass end sounds impressively solid, its depth is an illusion, though a very convincing and persuasive one. The compression, 'flattening' and chopped off treble and bass registers are pretty obvious if you compare it to 'real' hi-fi, but given that the bitrate is less than the MP3's many people load onto their iPods, it does give a good overall impression. Just don't look for subtleties of interpretation or fine nuances of instrumental texture.

Still, despite myself, I'm impressed. And since many people around the world often can't hear a Prom concert they'd like to on FM, or sometimes at all, because the local broadcaster doesn't relay it or buy the recording, there are a lot of music lovers for whom this is a godsend. And it's way, way superior to listening on AM or SW, the way I've sometimes had to do in the past when I've not been in London. The BBC techies deserve to get as many compliments as we can muster for that, I think.

All the same, if you can listen to any concert on FM and through serious hi-fi, even if it's only a handful, do. It's not the same as being in the RAH, but as a general rule the BBC's engineers take a lot of care and put a lot of hard work in to get as near as they can to the real thing.

(On the other hand, the Prom site Interactive editors don't. Deserve any compliments. I know I said you might find me at odds with some other reviewers, but I'm at odds with them, by the looks of it. They're ignoring me. So my professional pride is hurt.)

I just made the mistake of glancing at the Proms Message Board. If you would like to be reassured that classical music is an elitist pursuit of the middle classes and should have been encased in amber around 1850, and be fenced off from unworthy interlopers, have a read of what they are saying about Roger Norrington, or the Folk afternoon. It doesn't half make me angry. If I'd come across that sort of thing when I was 11 and just discovering classical music, which none of my working class family had any interest in, I'd have a run a mile from it and never have had the years of pleasure I have had out of it and would like a lot of other people to have, too.

Authentic Avant-garde Elgar

2008-07-22T21:26:00.012+01:00

Or, Roger Norrington's Elgar 1 on Tuesday Night, about which I will wax wildly enthusiastic in a day or two when I've managed to catch up a bit. For the first time, I grasped what Hans Richter meant, and I could believe Elgar really was in the avant-garde at the time.

The first movement was quite Mahlerian; which put off a French friend of mine who was listening with me and who I've been hopelessly, but determinedly, trying to convert to Mahler for 20 years. And there was a surprisingly robust pastoral element quite removed from the usual Malvern hills imagery you get. (I've been there, and to someone brought up in the Pennines like me, they're not hills, just pimples on the landscape, and molehills is somehow what so often come to mind in some Elgar 1's.) I'll gloss over my unreconstructed friend's snorted conviction that she could even hear "gambolling ducks", but she's of the 'cowpat composer' persuasion and was being rather vehement about it, and I misheard it as "gambling". Norrington's Elgar was in some ways certainly a gamble, far more than a gambol, and I wish I'd gone to the RAH to hear it live.

A few years ago at lunch in Abbey Road between recording sessions, the principal horn of the LSO told me he'd just bought a French Horn made in 1901, so he was 'all ready for the authentic Elgar revival'. Stupid of us to laugh (I thought he was being a bit sarky, but didn't dare say too much about my authentic instruments enthusiasm, because it was a comment of mine that had led to his crack in the first place, so I laughed, a bit hollowly, as well) after Tuesday night's Prom . . .Of course, what I should have pushed maybe was the idea of 'authentic performance' which Norrington excels at now.

Roger Norrington's interview can be heard from this page. Well worth it! (And he says some things I never dared write, however fervently I thought them. But then, I'm only a dilettante amateur.)

It is odd how a little flippant (but delightfully played) 'lollipop' like tonight's encore can feel like a bit of a letdown at home when you feel like quietly savouring the recollection of the performances (and the Haydn Cello concerto was superb, too) whereas in the hall, live, it's often a welcome release from the tension of concentrating so hard for the previous 50 minutes or more which Prommers are noted for. I wonder why that is?

(R3 relay) Prom 7: Elgar Symphony No 1

Applause, applause!

2008-07-22T21:18:00.006+01:00

Since I've been a strong fan of the 'authentic instrument revival' from way back, it seems I have to say sorry about my complaint about Proms audiences applauding between every movement. Listening to the interval interview with Roger Norrington (highly diverting and recommended, by the way, especially about 'baked beans' conducting, 'acoustic central heating' and 'wobbling stuff') I discovered people applauded each movement a century ago, and it was only later someone commented on 'the strange new habit of not applauding between movements.' Obviously, I missed the 'authentic applause revival' somehow, so I now shamefacedly accept I was wrong . . .

Making a bit of a mess of Messaien?

2008-07-21T22:23:00.006+01:00

Something went awry on Monday night. Whether it was the FM transmitter I get my transmission from or the R3 engineers at the RAH, I don't know.

I'd really been looking forward to hearing that organ again, but in the thirty seconds of silence before it started, there was a shocking amount of hiss. There's always some microphone hiss comes through on live Proms transmissions, but after the first few bars it also sounded as though it was being miked from way back over the Prommers at the back of the Arena and a single stereo pair at that or just from those that are meant to catch the audience applause.

This sounded like a bad technical blunder, but I'll see what the repeat recording sounds like. Until then, I can't offer a review, it wouldn't be fair. Time was when there were BBC techs I could have talked to about that, but those days, thanks to John Birt, are long gone, and there's no point in talking to a PR person in the Secretariat who can't tell the difference between a podcast and serious audio . . .

It must have been some bizarre reception fault, for when I listened to the repeat, it wasn't as bad as that, though the organ did sound disappointingly flat. I wondered if the engineers had decided to tame it a little bit after the first time. But I won't review that performance, because I found it really a little too prissily academic and, well, flat.

Prom 1: Festivity and a Feisty Organ

2008-07-21T15:43:00.004+01:00

Just a few passing comments, on this one, since I wasn’t particularly keen on the performers. Or the conductor, to be honest. He might be a welcome relief after Slatkin (for whom I invented my own nickname involving the substitution of a vowel but which I daren’t write here for fear of being sued; a truly dreadful spell, that) but for me, he lacks sympathy with a lot of the BBC SO’s repertoire. But I like Richard Stauss.

The Festliches Praeludium was grand. Large. But, for once, not bulky or sounding overstuffed like an old feather mattress. And the organ was even grander. Since it was refurbished, it sounds even prouder and more imperious than the Albert Memorial on the other side of the road to the Albert Hall looks since its refurbishment, and that’s saying something. Jiri Belohlavek was apparently worried it might sound too big: he was right, but its glorious bigness didn’t exactly do the piece any harm, just made it grandiosely celebratory, as it ought to be.

Belohlavek, perhaps, was too in thrall to the idea of the sheer size of the Strauss orchestra; when it came to the smaller scale of the Mozart Oboe Concerto. The first movement was decidedly perfunctory, too fast and casual with no subtlety at all, yet under other conductors the BBC SO is perfectly capable of sounding like a highly skilled and delicate chamber ensemble. Just not this first night. Somebody was out of sympathy, and to be honest, Nicholas Daniel’s cadenza was pretty but really rather trivial, and, to my mind though beautifully played, not very appropriate, for all Petroc Trelawny’s boosting of its natural origins and birdsong in his introduction. I’ve always thought of Mozart as a Townie, anyway, rather than a country boy. The last movement., as you might have expected, was rushed to a close.

And the Four Last Songs? Thanks to the original soloist being unable to appear, the performance had all the signs of having been perfunctorily re-rehearsed some time in the morning (one of the curses of the BBC SO’s schedule when it appears at the Proms, and one that too often leads to somewhat clumsy performances except under a small handful of supremely talented conductors—Gerghiev for one. This was a long programme, too, which always makes me suspicious: I suspect a hurried briefing, a few bars played over and pencilled notes on the players’ scores.) The orchestral conducting was simply out of sympathy with Christine Brewer’s voice. And, really, not subtle enough or shaded well enough. It plucked more at my Achilles tendons than my heartstrings. We’ll draw a veil (or maybe even seven) over that.

What I really wanted to hear was the Messaien, and that superb organ again. This birth, the way it sounded, virgin or not was not an easy birth. It is full of screaming, sweating and agonising heaves, or, if you don’t like my similes here, an incredible rending of temple curtains but with a glorious blazing blinding extended daybreak of glaring Meditteranean sunshine instead of a storm, ending with, not exhaustion, but sheer unbelievable drawn-out ecstasy of a new infant birth. I’ve never really heard the organ at Notre Dame, but this is what the Albert Hall organ was created for. Glorious.

Me, I’m not terribly sympathetic to Elliott Carter. Catenaire was not for me. Or anyone who isn’t amused by an out of control pianola with the handle wound round fast by a maniac. Strangely, a very strong smell of embrocation suffused my flat through its open windows as soon as it ended. The mad handle-winder must have sprained his wrist, and a whiff of the soothing ointment wafted over all the way from the Albert Hall . . .

I’ve noticed over the last few years that the Prom audience, or at least a sizeable part of it, seems to have reverted to an older practice of applauding a cadenza, an individual movement or each song of a cycle . .I wish they wouldn’t. It’s something that should only be done when you are really transported, and that ought to mean rarely. It’s terribly distracting when you are trying to keep the whole piece in mind during the performance whether you’re at home or actually in the Albert Hall. And I just don’t know how it came to be.

(R3 Repeat) Strauss, Festliches Praludium; Mozart Oboe Concerto; Messaien, La Nativite du Seigneur-Dieu parmi nous; Elliot Carter, Catenaires for Solo Piano

BBC Prom 3: A little late night ennui

2008-07-19T23:19:00.007+01:00

I was quite taken by Nigel Kennedy once upon a time. I think it was the punk hairstyle and ripped jeans. Refreshing after the dickie-bows and off-the-shoulder dresses that got mucky down around the hem. And I'm rebel enough (tell you why sometime, maybe) to have liked the idea of a violinist who got down and dirty. And had an accent.

Then a little later I reckoned perhaps I'd been taken in, more than taken, after hearing that awful screeching thoughtless helter-skelter Vivaldi recording. Apart from idly glancing over the drugs stories and the rehab tales, I've not paid him much attention since. So I didn't go to, or listen to the early evening Prom.

I did start listening to the R3 relay of the late night one though. I'm quite keen on jazz; I like improv, and I had an idea that this band with its Polish players might be interesting. The notion didn't last much beyond the first piece.

A combination of slush jazz and prog rock, somewhere between Yes and Rick Wakeman is the best I can do to describe it. Deadly dull. Fast, maybe, technically sharp no doubt, but self-indulgent, terribly dated, and in the end thoroughly boring. I won't be paying Nigel Kennedy any attention at all in future, I don't think. Certainly not as a 'jazz' musician.

(R3 relay)

Prom 3; Nigel Kennedy Quintet