Royal Albert Hall
Bernard Hughes
The ferocity of Tuesday's heat wasn’t reflected in the pleasantly air-conditioned Royal Albert Hall – the coolest I had felt all day – but was in the intense playing of the BBC Philharmonic, in a pair of knotty and urgent British symphonies.The programming had a neat simplicity: the fourth symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Tippett. It was also slightly thin – just over an hour of music which, even allowing for having to give way for a late-night Dido and Aeneas, could have squeezed in something else.Neither symphony is easy listening – and this, combined with the heat and travel chaos, meant Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
I had anticipated a sweltering evening at the Albert Hall. Sadly, though, the heatwave prevented me from even getting there – buckled rails or some similar problem led to the cancellation of my train. So this review is of the Radio 3 broadcast, heard on headphones in the comfort and relative cool of my back garden.The BBC is making an excellent job of transmitting from the Albert Hall. The sound is bright and lifelike, much closer and clearer than you’d ever hear in the audience. What’s missing is the atmosphere. Presenter Hannah French gave a good sense of what it was like, but it is not the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This one sounded implausible. Frida Kahlo, the great (and fashionable – collected by the likes of Madonna) Mexican painter interpreted by Indian classical music at the Elgar Room in the Royal Albert Hall. It was, however, entrancing, made a curious sense, and was a different way of immersing yourself both in the music and paintings.Presented by the enterprising Saudha Society of Poetry and Indian Music, the director TM Ahmed Kaysher, a Leeds-based poet was perched stage left and briefly described his own relation with Kahlo at a time in his life when he was suffering from depression Read more ...
David Nice
Had Claudio Abbado conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a major Elgar orchestral work – and to my knowledge he never saw the light about the composer’s due place among the European greats – it might have sounded something like last night’s “Enigma” Variations. Yes, John Wilson and his superband Sinfonia of London really are in that league. Elgar’s cavalcade of character-studies, both inward and extrovert, is the ultimate test, the most varied of masterpieces in a various programme.Perhaps it was a slightly over-long one. I’d have jettisoned Bax’s Tintagel in favour of a pleasing symmetry in Read more ...
David Nice
Any sensitive festival planner knows to begin the return to a new normal with something soft and elegiac – reflecting on all we’ve lost and mourned these past two years, as well as what we’re facing in the world now. Just over a fortnight ago, at the East Neuk Festival, the Elias Quartet led us gently by the hand with James MacMillan’s Memento. The 2022 BBC Proms began pianissimo, massed forces at the ready for the intermittent blazes of Verdi’s Requiem.It should have been a moving start to a Proms season which is rightly celebrating the big and the awe-inspiring. But those two years have Read more ...
theartsdesk
Remember how, back in the summer of 2020, we all wondered if large-scale symphonies would be back in the repertoire any time soon? I pessimistically predicted a decade of slow orchestral reconstruction.Yet right at the beginning of the 2021-2 season, the Philharmonia kicked off with two Strauss blockbusters. The Proms, having made last-minute readjustments to the 2021 programme, had inserted Sibelius’s Second Symphony into a magnificent first night from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Dalia Stasevska. But only this year are the great visiting orchestras back - and how.You may question Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Ever since his re-staging of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne has managed to update the art of storytelling through dance steps and gesture in a way that others have struggled to achieve.This new re-working of his 2000 dance-noir, The Car Man, has been adapted for the Royal Albert Hall with a catwalk stage that allows the audience to get up close and very personal with the dancers.In "Harmony, population 975", a mysterious stranger (Will Bozier as Luca) arrives in answer to a sign that reads "Man Wanted", and carnal havoc ensues. Lana, played seductively by Zizi Strallen, grows into Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Patti Smith has been making rabble rousing punk rock for half a century. She’s spent a lifetime on the road with rock stars and poets, surfing the charts, bringing music and wisdom to the people in myriad ways from beatnik to mainstream and now here she is at London’s Royal Albert Hall – a gig she says her agent has been trying to land for years.Grabbing hold of the audience from the get-go with the spoken word “Piss Factory” which ends with those prescient lines “I'm gonna be somebody, I'm gonna get on that train, go to New York City… I'm gonna be a big star and I will never return, Never Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
75 years after Sir Thomas Beecham founded the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it’s sobering to reflect that without this one person’s hubris and sheer cantankerousness, British musical life would be a whole lot worse off. Beecham, who fortuitously combined musical flair with force of personality and the inheritance of a pharmaceutical fortune, tended to start orchestras of his own after falling out with other ones. His chief creations, the London Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic orchestras, today are still going strong – indeed, arguably stronger than ever. The latter notches up three- Read more ...
theartsdesk
They must have been especially overjoyed to be back in front of (or with back to the greater part of) a live audience. But inspiring musicians is what conductors are there to do on the night, and what you see in the top image is what we got from the BBC Symphony Orchestra burning under its principal guest conductor Dalia Stasevska at the First Night of the Proms. That was a Sibelius Second Symphony like no other, but so much more throughout six revitalizing summer weeks was also unforgettable.This is the 12th year we've run Chris Christodoulou's conductor shots, and the 40th anniversary of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
No disrespect to Sakari Oramo and his colleagues in tomorrow’s farewell jamboree, but I wonder whether this performance should have featured as the Last Night of the Proms. After all its terror, grief and sorrow, the St Matthew Passion ends with such a gentle and healing leave-taking (“Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh”) that it would surely capture our pandemic travails across the past two years. Not that the Arcangelo choir and players, then or at any point during Bach’s inexhaustible miracle, ever skimped on drama and impact. Once more, after last week’s spectacular with the Monteverdi Choir, Read more ...
David Pickard
As anyone who has been trying to steer an arts organisation through the pandemic will tell you, the greatest challenge has been uncertainty; learning to live with the unknown and the unexpected. When we planned this year’s Proms, I would have said the “safest” concerts were our two solo organ recitals, but we had to replace the organist in both cases – one had quarantine challenges; the other broke their arm. On the other hand, I might have expected problems getting an orchestra in from all over Europe (Mahler Chamber Orchestra) or being able to honour our commitment to bring Tristan Read more ...