Royal Albert Hall
David Nice
"Ura!" as soldiers cry in Russian epic opera's last fling, Prokofiev's War and Peace: supertitles have arrived at the Proms, after much special pleading here and elsewhere. They're needed more than ever in Musorgsky's typically quirky survey of rival interest-groups at the beginning of young Tsar Peter I's reign, though I like to think that newcomers to Khovanshchina ("The Khovansky Business") would have got the message about each formidable personage and scene without them, so vivid was this realisation of the way Musorgsky characterises roistering princes, humble scribes and calm Old Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The title of John Adams’s Naive and Sentimental Music is a bit of a tease. Read literally it promises – or threatens – unsophisticated mawkishness, though that is the last thing it delivers. But maybe it was this title, alongside relatively unfamiliar 20th century repertoire, that kept the audience away. For whatever reason this was the worst attended main Prom I have been to for a long time – and what a shame, as it was also one of the very best.The Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen began with a musical palate-cleanser, the rarely heard Stravinsky arrangement of Bach’s Canonic Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How do you make a venerable warhorse frisk like a coltish show-pony? Hire William Christie as the trainer. In a performance of scintillating drama and crystal-clear definition, the past master of Baroque revival and re-invention coaxed the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its thoroughbred choir across all the tricky fences on Handel’s long and winding course. At the end of Israel in Egypt, with the Egyptians vanquished and the Israelites freed, the voice of Miriam the prophetess – one of the two soprano solo parts – exhorts her people to “Sing ye to the Lord, for he has triumphed Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
As the lights dim the choir turn their backs on the audience. A spotlight picks out a single singer. With one hand aloft he leads the male voices through the “Pater Noster” and “Ave Maria” in a stern and stately plainchant. Then suddenly the full battalion of cornetts and sackbuts, theorbos and recorders burst into the joyful opening of Monteverdi’s Vespers, and we are up and running.The Vespers, like Bach’s B Minor Mass, was not heard complete in the composer’s lifetime, and may indeed not even have been conceived to have been heard in a single sitting. As Bach did later, Monteverdi seems to Read more ...
David Nice
Romantic concerto, contemporary work, classical symphony: it's a common format at the Proms, but not usually in that order. Both David Sawer's 1997 firework The Greatest Happiness Principle and Haydn's ever-radical Symphony No. 99, sharing a light-filled second half, would normally be reserved as what composer Anders Hillborg once told me is known in America as "parking-lot music", taking the opening slot.The idea here was to move from dark and steaky Brahms upwards into Haydn's heaven, but as it turned out there was plenty of dancing radiance in this unusual, often exquisite interpretation Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Expectations ran high for this first performance of Julian Anderson’s piano concerto, and they weren’t disappointed. Taking its title from a book of the same name by Andre Malraux, The Imaginary Museum goes on a journey around the world over the course of its six movements. Malraux’s idea was that a coherent collection – of art, artefacts, the stuff of culture – can only be assembled in our heads, when their physical manifestations are scattered to the four winds in the galleries and palaces of the globe.Coherence is the key word here. Ever since his Thebans opera – long in the making, first Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A packed Royal Albert Hall on a Tuesday night for a programme of 20th-century English music. Have the nation’s concert-goers come over all prematurely patriotic? Is Holst’s The Planets really that much of a draw? Or could the crowds have more to do with John Wilson – the straight-backed, schoolmasterly figure at the centre of the musical maelstrom? Whatever their motivation, the capacity crowd surely got what they came for in the scope and drama of this compact Prom.If the Holst was the headliner here, then Vaughan Williams’ Ninth Symphony was a thoughtful opener, sneaked in under the cover Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Ten days ago I reviewed the First Night of the 2017 Proms. Last night I was back at the Royal Albert Hall to hear the First Night of the 1966 Proms. This time-capsule experience was courtesy of a re-enactment of Sir Malcolm Sargent’s 500th Prom, in what turned out to be his final season. It gave an idea of Sargent’s musical tastes – middle-of-the-road classics and English music – and, in places, of his famously audience-pleasing conducting style.Andrew Davis was in energetic and animated form on the podium, belying his years with a physical engagement with the music. There was something of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When a trail-blazing orchestra takes on a world-transforming work, it would be pointless to leave the staid old rules of concert etiquette intact. Not only did the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon stretch their repertoire of symphonies performed from memory to cover the epic expansiveness and ear-bending innovations of Beethoven’s Third, the Eroica. For half an hour, as this Prom began, Collon and presenter Tom Service also turned the Royal Albert Hall into Britain’s biggest classroom as they sought to scrub the crust of over-familiarity from Beethoven’s breakthrough monster from 1803, Read more ...
David Nice
What a pity Beethoven never composed an appendage to Fidelio called The Sorrows of Young Marzelline. One crucial moment apart, the music he gives to his second soprano in his only opera isn't his best, but Louise Alder so lived the role of the gaoler's daughter in love with a woman disguised as a man that everything else felt rather less intense. It's only fair to say that there were other singers facing bigger challenges very stylishly, for the most part, but neither they nor the BBC Philharmonic under its chief conductor Juanjo Menja made us feel as though their lives depended on the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s at times like this that I give thanks for the Proms. Who else would (or could) have put together a programme pairing Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique with an 18th-century sonic fantasy, or topped it off with a substantial UK premiere? A bit bonkers on the page, it remained so in performance. But the dramatic logic was absolutely sound; forget a stroll in the Swiss Alps or on Italian hillsides, these were musical journeys of a more primal kind, tugging at the thread of the human psyche and following it down to its darkest depths.Hell, according to a certain French authority, may be “other Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Nicola Benedetti was the star of this show, no doubt about that. She is a Proms regular and favourite, attracting a large and enthusiastic audience, the Royal Albert Hall filled almost to capacity. And she didn’t disappoint, giving a performance of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto that demonstrated all her strengths: precision, focus, variety of colour and mood, but above all the passion and conviction needed to make sense of this long and emotionally complex work.The concerto is in four movements, with an extended cadenza linking the last two. The first movement has the mood of a serene Read more ...