Royal Albert Hall
theartsdesk
The BBC Proms are steeped in traditions, many admirable, some arcane, the odd one ever so slightly maddening. In the short life of The Arts Desk - we turned three on Sunday, the day after the 2012 Proms season came to a close - another tradition has come into being. Every year we publish a gallery of portraits of conductors at work. These astonishing photographs are all by Chris Christodoulou, who has been capturing the Proms in pictures for 31 years.These, it should be stated, are the images which are very much not released for use by the press after each Prom. And you can see why. They find Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You’ve never seen so many people at a Prom, thousands of them packed into every space of the Albert Hall inside, while outside a 100-metre line of hopefuls queued in vain to stand in a pit where a small cat couldn’t have been added. But then this was a luxury Prom: with the Vienna Philharmonic and two musicians of golden integrity and sensitivity, lifetime members of the high table, the pianist Murray Perahia and the conductor Bernard Haitink playing two works born in Vienna.Size matters in the Albert Hall - they played spacious Beethoven and epic Bruckner - but it takes musicians of special Read more ...
geoff brown
If you’re going to bash a tam-tam for six, the Albert Hall is the perfect place to do it. The reverberation lasts for ages; and everyone in the audience can see you bashing. That must explain in part why Messiaen’s hieratic, gong-crazy Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum has notched up 10 Prom performances in 45 years. Sunday’s was the first, though, to be performed by the historic and wonderful Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, an outfit previously associated more with Bach and Mendelssohn than Messiaen’s idiosyncratic altar cloths in sound.But times have changed since Riccardo Chailly arrived Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I'd love to see the stats on the last time a Prom was this packed for an afternoon organ recital. Were it not for the fact that organist Cameron Carpenter was sporting spandex trousers encrusted in silver glitter, a wife beater and Mohawk, you could have been mistaken for thinking we were back in the organ glory days of the early 19th century. Even the programme harked backward, offering as it did big, bloated Romantic transcriptions, arrangements and improvisations (pretty much everything in fact except the urtext).Scratch that. We did get two pieces of unadulterated Bach, the Toccata Read more ...
geoff brown
Champagne on ice in the private boxes; scarcely any spare seats. This isn’t the normal situation for a concert climaxing in Witold Lutosławski’s Third Symphony, a modernist work whose usual audience is more than two men and a dog but still doesn’t pull in the crowds. What pulled in last night’s Proms crowd, of course, was Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra so lustrous that people would pay decent money just to hear them tune up.Indeed, they tuned up beautifully, though still lovelier sounds emerged shortly after as they sank themselves into the work that probably Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's not completely unheard of what Sir Simon Rattle did at the start of last night's Prom, where he elided two familiar works - Ligeti's colouristic classic Atmosphères and the Prelude to Act One of Wagner's Lohengrin - into a seamless whole, beating without stopping from one into the other. But it was still pretty breathtaking. With the Wagner becoming an integral part of, and dreamy payoff to, Ligeti's wheezy Modernist nightmare, the works were transformed. In their place stood one single work: a strange new musical wonder by Ligetiwagner. It was the most magical opening to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Eric Whitacre – less a composer or conductor, more a global choral phenomenon. Just the mention of his name in last night’s concert introduction drew whoops and wolf-whistles from the crowd, certainly not a reaction you tend to get for Beethoven, Boulez or Cage (though perhaps the latter gets a silent cheer). Like or loathe the hype that surrounds Whitacre, there’s no denying his role in popularising choral singing, nor the pure American genealogy of his style, which we can trace back through Morten Lauridsen and Randall Thompson to Bernstein and even Copland.Making his Proms debut with the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In a festival season as long as the BBC Proms there are always going to be some longueurs, weeks where the orchestral playing is more adequate than astonishing. Get stuck in one of these and it’s easy to start doubting your ears, to wonder whether six weeks of orchestral assault have dulled them. Then you hear an ensemble like the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester. A youth orchestra in name alone, there is nothing callow about this elite group of young musicians, who last night under Daniele Gatti coaxed and wrung the Royal Albert Hall audience into ecstasy upon ecstasy.A great concert grows out Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
After the all-singing, all-dancing, all-helicoptering brilliance of Stockhausen Mittwoch aus Licht, the dry routine of an opera in concert didn't seem a very enticing prospect. That's the problem with this year's Cultural Olympiad. We're becoming very spoilt by it. What should have been a mouth-watering prospect - a fantastic cast performing a great opera - suddenly began to feel run-of-the-mill when compared to the once-in-a-lifetime event that was Mittwoch. But my concerns were short-lived.I saw and loved the original ENO production of Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten's brilliant Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ Ninth Symphony, completed in 2012 and heard in London for the first time in this concert, is dedicated to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee. Those are not words to strike eager anticipation into my heart , though I’m happy to say that being Master of the Queen’s Music doesn’t appear to have dulled the composer’s powers in the way the equivalent title seems to nobble poets. Indeed, the dedication is merely that, and the work is no winsome tribute.The 25-minute single-movement symphony is modelled, Davies’ programme note explains, on the idea of a church with a central Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
It is a rare treat for Londoners to have the CBSO with Andris Nelsons in town, and the Albert Hall was, if not fully sold out, then certainly well stocked. It would be fair to assume that the main draw was Shostakovich’s giant and much-debated Leningrad symphony after the interval; but first up was Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila overture and the UK premiere of Emily Howard’s Calculus of the Nervous System. Both together they added up to a mere 20 minutes and we were out in the interval in the blink of an eye: such are the challenges of programming around a 75-minute symphony. In its short span Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Described variously in the press as "virile", an "Aryan hunk" and a "great blond bear" of a man, Stuart Skelton may be the physical embodiment of machismo, but there's nothing of the beefcake about his singing. A Heldentenor of rare beauty and lyricism, Skelton's rise to operatic fame may have come young, but his is a voice and a career that looks set to stay the course.Skelton has come a long way since his singing career started at age eight, as a treble in St Andrew's Cathedral Choir, Sydney. His journey from the music of the Anglican choral tradition to international success in the big Read more ...