Prom 36: Night Thoughts

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 34: A Tsar Performance

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.)

Olympic Fireworks and Damp Squibs

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.

Nil nisi bonum . . .

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