Classical music
David Benedict
Fingers on buzzers: which piece of music at this year’s Proms boasts a percussion section including glockenspiel, xylophone, five pitches of cowbells, car horn, taxi horn, anvils, revolving door noise, smashing glass, bubble-wrap-popping, pistol-shot and elastic band? OK, here’s a clue: it’s by Scott Bradley (1891-1977). Who? Bradley (pictured below) was the man who wrote the music for 113 of the 114 Hanna-Barbera/MGM Tom and Jerry cartoons and Tom and Jerry at MGM – a new, six-minute thrill-ride suite of his work – is part of John Wilson’s Hollywood Rhapsody Prom broadcast live on BBC Four Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may not be the land of milk and honey, but as the home of wine and apricots Lower Austria’s Wachau might just be even better. Bookended by the towns of Melk and Krems, this stretch of the Danube valley is absurdly picturesque, strewing the banks of the river with enough wooded hillsides and ruined castles to fill a Gothic novel (or several).But at just 50 miles from Vienna this storybook-wilderness is really anything but wild. The crags are neatly terraced into vineyards (earning the region its nickname of “the Tuscany of Austria"), while the abbeys and castles tell a tale of religious and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The visits of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester are a regular Proms highlight, only preceded (for me) by the John Wilson Orchestra in the speed with which they go from announcement to diary. Last year’s concert under Gatti was a whirling celebration of dance – a beautifully programmed narrative that spun us from Wagner to Ravel and left us breathless. The year before Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov brought us passions from East and West, united by the precision of Sir Colin Davis. This year it was the turn of Shostakovich – that youth orchestra staple – and for the first time I was left a Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Rachmaninov: The Bells, Symphonic Dances Rundfunkchor Berlin, Berliner Philharmoniker/Sir Simon Rattle (Warner Classics)The red spine on the jewel case and the typeface look familiar enough, though the top right hand corner of the CD cover shows Warner Classics’ logo. EMI Classics is no more. After more than 30 years, Sir Simon Rattle is no longer an EMI recording artist. His first release under the new regime has some sensational highspots – notably an exhilarating, colourful account of Rachmaninov’s choral symphony The Bells. Konstantin Balmont’s doomy Poe-inspired text proved an Read more ...
David Nice
Prokofiev’s Fifth is a symphony for which the conductor’s setting tends to be turned to either bright and light or dark and heavy. Perhaps because of the composer’s perceived joker role as set against Shostakovich the symphonic chronicler of Soviet tragedy, Vassily Sinaisky at the 2005 Proms made a glib, glossy showpiece of it. Valery Gergiev has always veered to the black side. But last night Yannick Nézet-Séguin worked sympathetically with the humane inscaping of the orchestra Gergiev did so much to mould, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, to give the best of all possible worlds, emphasising the Read more ...
David Nice
Concert programmes are designed to make the mind flexible with constant contrasts. More often, though, the great is the enemy of the good-ish. Last night an Elgar masterpiece was always going to overshadow its second-half predecessor, a hazily pleasant piece for strings and – novelty value – six harps by the colleague Elgar called “dear old Gran”, candidate for this Proms season's resuscitation attempt Granville Bantock. And earlier, Sibelius bopped a BBC commission on the head with supernatural noises that could have been conjured yesterday.Always beware – I’ve written it several times Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There have already been many musical tributes to Sir Colin Davis, whose death in April left us all so much the poorer, but last night’s from the London Symphony Orchestra was particularly and wonderfully poignant. Davis himself was originally scheduled to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra – an ensemble whose relationship with him extended back over 50 years – but was replaced, fittingly, by his protégé Daniel Harding. A planned Sibelius Second Symphony was exchanged for Elgar’s Symphony No. 2 – a work of valediction, whose funeral march can rarely have paced with such delicate gravity. Read more ...
geoff brown
Standing in the Albert Hall arena, critics’ notepad in hand, I felt rather like PC Plod taking notes at a crime scene. Only there was no serious crime to report in this engaging late-night Prom by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and its former Principal Conductor, Ilan Volkov – the ideal man to conduct music that isn’t by Brahms or Schubert.He took charge, you may remember, of the Proms’ epic John Cage circus last year, and the composers corralled into this endeavour could be counted among Cage’s many friends and children. From America we heard from Morton Feldman and Frederic Rzewski; Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
In a couple of weeks Marin Alsop will become the first woman ever to conduct the Last Night of the Proms. Yesterday's programme of 19th century works by Brahms and Schumann, on the fifth of the eight Saturday nights of the season, thus had its Proms-specific raison d'etre, a signpost towards that history-making final Saturday. Just as the last night's high jinks have their own, ordered traditions, the Proms planners definitely enjoy giving a self-referential logic to the season.The programme, which Alsop conducted entirely from memory, was a cleverly constructed juxtaposition of works which Read more ...
geoff brown
Jeremy Paxman’s beard may have been a wonder and a talking point for five days, but Michael Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage beats it by almost 60 years. Ecstatic, visionary, energetic music, yes indeed. But, oh, the composer’s libretto! The Magic Flute, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, English folk lore, Greek myths, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Carl Jung’s archetypes of the unconscious mind, wafts of wisdom from the East: all get crammed and overheated in the pot, cooked by someone with a soaring lyrical musical gift but only a talent for awkward verbiage when it comes to writing words. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The fascination of the East has been a constant in classical music’s history, from the jangling sounds of the Janissary bands to Mozart’s Seraglio, Sheherazade’s dreamy tales to Britten’s seductive gamelan. Last night’s Prom gave the East a chance to answer back, setting Nishat Khan’s new Sitar Concerto in dialogue with Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony – a musical portrait of a landscape rather closer to home.Getting us into the mood, Holst’s short tone poem Indra was something of an oddity. Anyone expecting swirling Orientalist fantasy would have been disappointed by the rather anonymous Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
It makes a lot of sense for the National Youth Orchestra to give the first ever free Prom. Both, one assumes, economically but also in terms of ethos and atmosphere. New and tentative concert goers would have had very little cause to be intimidated by the fresh faces on the Albert Hall stage last night. That’s thing about youthful energy – you can’t fake it. The same goes for musical quality, or course, and thankfully the NYO has bags of that too.Vaughan Williams’s Toward the Unknown Region showed off the beautifully rehearsed choirs, making controlled and expressive use of dynamic range Read more ...