Royal Albert Hall
Rachel Halliburton
For Delius – then a young man, visiting Norway in the late 1880s to walk in its mountains – his first encounter with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was nothing less than an epiphany. Already high on the grandeur of nature in a country defined by its shimmering fjords and austere mountains, he found the text to be an intoxicating affirmation of the glories of the world in a humanistic universe.It took him several years to complete A Mass of Life, the choral work defined by many as his masterpiece, which was eventually brought to the public attention in 1909 at a London performance Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a Proms paradox that’s familiar to Early Music fans. Some works are too challenging – too big, too expensive, too uncommercial, too obscure – to do anywhere else. The trouble is, the Royal Albert Hall is the absolute last place you’d want to hear them.So you go, and half-hear, half-imagine a performance that requires you to fill in the blanks of acoustic, space and detail, superimposing cathedrals, ducal staterooms or Venetian balconies as required. It’s not nothing, but it’s not the full Monteverdi either.Luckily for us, Hervé Niquet and his Concert Spirituel had done quite a lot of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
You can't explain stage presence like Anoushka Shankar’s. It just "is". When she steps out in front of a completely packed Royal Albert Hall, and utters a welcoming, exploratory, London-ish “Hi... welcome to my Prom… Oh, my God!”, a friendly connection with audience is made. Instantly and with disarming ease.Then come memories: she thinks back to having participated with her father in the Ravi Shankar Prom in 2005 and her further three appearances since then, notably one in 2020 with no audience: “It’s so much nicer to have you guys all in here.”And then, from the moment she starts to play, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Water surged through this Prom from first spray to last drop. But there was nothing damp or diluted about Edward Gardner’s helmsmanship as he steered the London Philharmonic Orchestra through a succession of liquid rhapsodies: three from the early 20th century; one from 1993.Aigul Akhmetshina, the star mezzo (and ubiquitous Carmen) who sang in Ravel’s Shéhérazade song-cycle, went with the flow herself in a notably collegiate performance that impressively blended her own sumptuous instrument with the lush orchestration around the vocal line. On paper, this looked like an almost overloaded Read more ...
David Nice
“Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night,” quoth Blake. Beethoven and Bartók knew both extremes, but Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra led us from the most dancing of Seventh Symphonies to the endless night of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, from explosive A major to quietest C sharp minor. If not everything along the way was perfect, or even in one major case present, the outlines were bold and engaging.Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was the last major work I heard at the Pärnu Music Festival only a fortnight ago. It bears repeating that young Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Arvo Pärt was into his 40s before he made had his Big Musical Idea: simplicity. He has spent the subsequent half-century pursuing this ideal, largely through the religious choral music that has been dubbed Holy Minimalism. And in this year of his 90th birthday, the Proms gave the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir a late-night concert to celebrate this music – and the people turned out, in what was the best-attended late-nighter I can remember.The programme consisted of eight (plus an encore) small pieces by Pärt, alongside other pieces in similar vein, and one very much not. What was Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
According to the programme, Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra is heard somewhere around the world every other week. In which case I’ve been unlucky in never having heard it live before, despite being a fan for nearly 30 years. So I was relieved that last night’s Prom’s outing – in Tadaaki Otaka’s farewell with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, after a 40 year collaboration – didn’t disappoint.The playing was urgent, colourful and glorious - everything I could have wanted. Completed in 1945, the Concerto is a direct descendant of Bartók’s, and this came over loud and clear in the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This Prom began in sombre and melancholic shades of grey. Then, as her encore, the superb Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili launched into Liszt’s Paganini étude, “La Campanella”, and bells of long-awaited joy rang around the Royal Albert Hall. Under those leaping acrobatic fingers, musical sunshine drove away the clouds.Planned or not, these drastic contrasts prepared the ground for the volatile monster to come: Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, with its huge lurches and topples from darkness to light, and back again.Ryan Wigglesworth conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He began with Read more ...
David Nice
It started like Sunday afternoon band concert on a seaside promenade, a massive ensemble playing it light. But while there were several too many Shostakovich pops, the Ravel concerto and Walton symphony ahead sailed for deeper waters, And the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is on top form, lucky to have one of the world’s best conductors, Mark Wigglesworth, in charge. Having proved his credentials in dance music with a Portsmouth performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Act 2 last December, Wigglesworth struck a similarly spacious mix of control and relaxation in the Shostakovich Suite Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The auditorium and arena were packed – and the stage even more so, bursting at the seams with players and singers: the perfect set-up for a First Night of the Proms. This is traditionally an opportunity to programme a large-scale choral work, and last night that was Vaughan Williams’s seldom heard Sancta Civitas. Of course it’s seldom heard, with its huge orchestra expanded to include organ, piano and off-stage trumpet, baritone soloist, massed choir behind the orchestra and children’s choir in the gallery – plus a blink-and-you-miss-it tenor solo at the end that must command the highest Read more ...
mark.kidel
Will Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour ever come to an end? Two years on from the last UK tour, he’s returned, with substantially the same band, once again mostly featuring material from his brilliant album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). He’s a little less steady on his feet, but remains as present as ever, clearly enjoying being on stage and contact with an audience that welcomes him with love as well as uncritical adulation.There is a routine: he mostly starts out standing beside Tony Garnier, his wonderfully supple root of a bass player, with a handheld mic, but not for long. He soon moves over Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Out of emergencies may come revelations. Sir András Schiff has broken his leg, and we wish him a super-speedy recovery. At the Proms, his promised Art of Fugue will have to wait. Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, a past winner of the Chopin Prize, stepped in yesterday with a late-night recital programme that at first glance could hardly have looked more alien to the austere grandeur of Bach’s contrapuntal epic.Cho followed three pieces from Ravel’s Miroirs with the second book, “Italie”, of Liszt’s rhapsodic musical scrapbook of his travels of the 1840s, Années de Pèlerinage. The first revelation Read more ...