Nick Breckenfield’s Proms Round Up
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Reviewed by: Nick Breckenfield
Reviewed: 14 September, 2008
Venue: NULL
Well there it is. Another musical summer at an end! From that vantage of hindsight, I look back on a supremely successful BBC Proms season. In April, it certainly looked good on paper – although one of the most daunting since I first became a season-ticket holder two decades ago. Indeed, noting that – apart from the Last Night (starting later in the evening and scheduled to be shorter than in previous years) – there were more Royal Albert Hall concerts, many of which longer than the norm. I suggested to Roger Wright (Director of the Proms) that he was offering us at least 20 percent more music than last year.
Even if that was perhaps an exaggeration, it was almost true for me, as I attended 58 of the 76 concerts in the Royal Albert Hall – four more than my previous best (I foolishly boasted this Roger my new total, eliciting the skilful put-down, “so, 18 less than me”, to which I hoped my “ah – but you didn’t stand” riposte might restore some self-esteem!). And of those 58, I’d say that only two-and-a-half have disappointed.
Aside from Gianandrea Noseda’s wearing, sweaty semaphoring of Beethoven 9, the only real dud this year, was the one that could only be called Symphonie bombastique, Gustavo Dudamel’s conducting marked a mid-point nadir of the Proms, although – perversely – proving how good a conductor he could be in Hillborg’s Peacock Tales, eyes glued to the score (a hint there, perhaps) in accompanying Martin Fröst’s pirouetting.
Fröst was even more mesmerising in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, one of the well-programmed late-night recitals which also, notably, celebrated the 40th-birthday of The King’s Singers and introduced Kristjan Järvi to the Proms, white-hot in Americana with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
Notably busier than recent seasons (for once the statistics can be believed), with the Arena definitely feeling fuller more often, highlights tumbled one after the another during every week. Vaughan Williams and Messiaen were the principal programme beneficiaries, but Wright’s featuring of specific artists were also a success, and notable belated Proms debuts were made – particularly Jordi Savall and Christophe Rousset at Cadogan Hall.
With a high standard throughout, it is notable how well the home-grown can stand against international competition. Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches held its own after the high-voltage Berliner Philharmoniker the night before; the BBC Symphony Orchestra in The Planets carried on the virtuosity from Haitink and the Chicago Symphony 24 hours earlier. Saraste’s Oslo Phil also stole a march on Lorin Maazel and his New Yorkers (who provided perfectly good performances, but not special ones).
Of course, one’s Classical Source colleagues may have a different opinion! And, for the sixth year running, this site has reviewed EVERY BBC Proms concert and chamber recital.
So, heartfelt thanks for a brilliant season. The three specified Days – Folk, Stockhausen and Bach – each worked a treat and, like the longer programmes, seemed to encourage audiences, rather than keep them away. There must be a Haydn Day next year (hopefully many). Which extended opera can Wright choose after Messiaen’s Saint François? And will we have a major choral work in the first half of the Last Night (surely a trick missed this year – we could have had Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony – especially with Bryn Terfel already on the bill!).
Finally some top of the bills – purely personal:
Best concerto performance – Julia Fischer in Brahms’s Violin Concerto (beating Nicholas Daniel’s Mozart and Elliott Carter concertos and Murray Perahia and Haitink’s perfect Mozart and a special mention to Finghin Collins for his spectacular Stanford)
Best symphony – Oslo’s Sibelius 1 or Chicago’s Shostakovich 4
Best debut – Gürzenich Orchestra, Cologne – who also offered a Parsifal encore after a very long programme, including Mahler 5 and the Stockhausen’s Punkte
Best programme – the BBC Scottish SO’s electro-acoustic evening – Harvey, Messiaen and Varèse
Best Proms première and overall event – Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise
The last night of a season of 164 events spanning an eight-week period, or the Last Night, a concert in celebration of the 2008 series of BBC Proms concerts that ended on Friday? That is the question, posed by Christopher Wood in the programme, that really needs an answer if we are to put the Last Night of the Proms in context. The latter has to be the case; particularly when we take into account the various outdoor events taking place throughout the United Kingdom that include groups such as the Abba tribute-band Björn Again. The Last Night of the Proms is a party … the real ‘last night’ was the evening before.
Bryn Terfel, after announcing in the press recently that he was “slowing down” did anything but on this occasion. In the first half he revived, with some aplomb, familiar roles. Wolfram’s song to the evening star is a tiny gem in Act Three of “Tannhäuser”, here flowing more like a lullaby than a tribute. Terfel’s performance is probably too intelligent for a piece that requires passion first and foremost, a rounded tone in the lower registers and much more emotion. The Puccini and Verdi, by comparison, were close to perfect – a slightly crazed Scarpia and then the buffoon Falstaff, Terfel fully dressed as the latter including an enlarged tummy. Norrington’s control of the orchestra’s balance was second to none.
The first performance of Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy” fell apart in the middle; it was completed at the last minute and under-rehearsed. No such problem here with Norrington and the BBC Symphony Orchestra ever-sympathetic accompanists. Antiphonal violins were an advantage as Hélène Grimaud contrasted Beethoven’s thick, heavyset chords with lighter, more delicate finger-work. Vocal soloists were set immediately in front of the chorus, and thus behind the orchestra, which presented challenges in terms of balance that were not always satisfactorily overcome.
Continuing a quasi-tradition (though not last year) of introducing a new work to the second half of the Last Night, 30-year-old Scottish Composer Anna Meredith stepped up to the mark with her BBC commission froms (note the ‘trendy’ use of the lower case). Only named a month before this first performance and meaning ‘from the Proms’. Meredith, no stranger to music technology, has made good use of four orchestras around the country who, together with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, each have their own score and perform together through the wonders of satellite. By the composer’s own admission, planning what would occur when and building allowances for delays dependent upon where the audience was located was “massively complicated”.
Finding music that complements and enhances our understanding of the ‘traditional’ Proms performance of Beethoven’s ‘Choral’ Symphony is never easy. In choosing works that take us on a spiritual journey leading to the ultimate quest for joy that lies within the Beethoven symphony, Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic hit upon an original and stimulating programme that promised much, albeit with variable results.
Far better was to follow. Penderecki’s Threnody ‘For the Victims of Hiroshima’ (1960) is a disturbing and frankly disquieting memorial to the victims of the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the close of World War Two. 52 strings are plucked, tapped, scraped and worked in almost every way on order to produce a world of anger and fear. Some passages are so quiet it’s hard to hear at times what is being played. But this is not a quietness of tranquillity and serenity, there’s something much more disturbing going on: this is the outright horror of man’s inhumanity to man. And what a good idea to dive straight into the becalming sense of peace of Beethoven’s “Elegischer Gesang” (Elegiac song), written in memory of the young wife of a friend who had died at the age of 24. The short work was originally written for solo voices and string quartet: here we had orchestra and the splendid voices of the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, its sense of peace and acceptance of death a fitting and spacious companion to the anger of the Penderecki.
Without an overture-type piece, the single work in the short first half was Matthias Pintscher’s 1999 ‘dramatic scene’, “Hérodiade-Fragmente” – receiving a belated Proms performance (two years ago a fire at the RAH cancelled the Philadelphia Orchestra concert, Christoph Eschenbach conducting then too, in which it was scheduled).
Marisol Montalvo, inhabiting the role of Herodias, coped well with the demanding rigours of Pintscher’s writing, giving a fully engaging, dramatic performance; but there was not enough subtlety or contemplation in her reading, which resorted too often to all-purpose hysterics that shed little insight on Herodias’s complex, contradictory state of mind. This was a shame, but Eschenbach’s conviction ensured that the performance had tension and genuinely captivated.
Pléïdes is a 45-minute percussion sextet that might almost be a riposte to Steve Reich’s Drumming in its systematic working-through of a formal process denoted by the specific percussive use; for all that the explosive rhythmic energy of Xenakis’s music is worlds away from the incremental change of his younger contemporary.
As to those surrounding works (in a concert dedicated to Vernon Handley, who had died in the morning), Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia antartica (1952) was given a distinctly uneven account – at its best in the capricious evocation of marine life in the ‘Scherzo’ (its questioning close unerringly conveyed) and the defiance-cum-fatalism informing the ‘Epilogue’ (wordless voices and wind machine evocatively to the fore). Conversely, the textural and expressive contrasts in the ‘Prelude’ were sectional rather than seamless, while the vast remoteness of the central ‘Landscape’ went for too little at a relatively swift tempo – the organ-capped climax less than overwhelming – and the ‘Intermezzo’, with its undertones of compassion and self-sacrifice, seemed pensive rather than plaintive. Maybe the BBC Symphony Orchestra felt just a touch jaded at the end of a long season, but the conviction brought to Andrew Davis’s often-revelatory reading of the Ninth Symphony was largely absent here.
Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto began promisingly with an orchestral tutti that caught the music’s barely suppressed tensions. However, Murray Perahia who, who recorded an outstanding Mozart concerto cycle, now offers a distinctly mannered take on music which used to be second nature to him, dragging the tempo back at his first entry and later exaggerating the bass line. The cadenzas in the first movement and finale were Perahia’s own; at least they were relatively brief, avoiding the harmonic non sequiturs that disfigure many contemporary examples. However, although taken flowingly the Larghetto slow movement was sentimentalised, Perahia’s left-hand frequently placed before the right and positively festooned with decorations. The finale, stern and unbending, offered little by way of light and shade in the contrasting episodes.
As soon as the juggernaut was launched it became apparent that this was going to be more dogged than desperate. However like rats caught in a cage, such unbridled desperation is absolutely integral to this music. “Into the Whirlwind”, the phrase used to describe the pure terror of Stalin’s Purges of the 1930s, would be an apt subtitle for the work. It may be the most overtly Mahlerian of Shostakovich’s symphonies but there is also an almost Asiatic streak of eruptive, dangerously unpredictable violence which is far removed from European symphonic norms and the work makes its fullest effect by its abrupt juxtaposition of menacing calm and abrasive extremes, not by shoe-horning it into the mainstream European symphonic tradition.
In his laid-back talk with Andrew McGregor, Mark-Anthony Turnage spoke of his influences being Stockhausen, Xenakis and Henze and the encouragement given him by Oliver Knussen. Turnage stated that the Second Viennese School also influenced him and this was evident in the chamber works played here; indeed Schoenberg (as well as Schubert) seemed to be the key influences.
Following the pre-concert talk and performances, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra returned to the Proms, this time under its Principal Conductor Bernard Haitink and began with more Turnage, Chicago Remains (2007). The highly evocative and concentrated 16-minute work was initiated by the cityscape of Chicago, evoking its seedy and underworld side rather than its sheen and glitz. Although composed for large forces the score is intimate and sparse rather than being a flashy and bombastic showcase.
The ‘Prelude’, scored for string sextet, from Richard Strauss’s final opera, “Capriccio”, opened the recital. Written during a dark period in Europe’s history (and premiered in front of one of the leading Nazis, von Schirach, who was offering some protection to Strauss’s Jewish wife and child) this excerpt is nonetheless very pleasing on the senses and full of emotion. Delightfully and expertly played by the Aronowitz Ensemble, this was clear proof that music can transcend tragedy.
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Stéphane Denève’s annual excursion South of the Border produced an enterprising programme which, for the most part, played to this combination’s considerable strengths.
However, on this occasion despite some memorable touches, especially in the slow movement, this was a reading of the Second Concerto more remarkable for some fine individual touches in the orchestral playing – a glorious horn solo in the opening movement and a perfectly calibrated introduction from the strings to the second – than for anything we heard in the solo part. Hough simply does not command the weight of tone for this work in the vastness of the Royal Albert Hall, frequently struggling to be heard despite the sensitive orchestral accompaniment and afflicted by more than his share of technical problems. Best was the slow movement, poised, withdrawn and marked for once by a most welcome subtlety. Elsewhere there was an affectedly narcissistic slant to this reading, which too readily lost impetus at key moments, for instance in the backwash to the first movement’s climax.