Proms 2011 – The Last Night: Lang Lang, Miraculous Mandarin, Jenny Agutter, Susan Bullock, Edward Gardner, Rule Britannia!
Peter Maxwell Davies
Musica benevolens (Musicians Benevolent Fund commission: world premiere)
Bartók
The Miraculous Mandarin – Suite
Wagner
Götterdämmerung – Immolation Scene
Liszt
Piano Concerto No.1 in E flat
Chopin
Grande Polonaise brillante, Op.22
Grainger
Mo nighean dubh (My Dark-Haired Maiden)
Britten
The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell), Op.34
Richard Rodgers
The Sound of Music – Climb ev’ry mountain [arr. Robert Russell Bennett]Carousel – You’ll never walk alone [arr. Stephen Jackson]
Elgar
Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 in D
Arne, arr. Sargent
Rule, Britannia!
Parry, orch. Elgar
Jerusalem
The National Anthem [arr. Britten]
Susan Bullock (soprano)
Lang Lang (piano)
Jenny Agutter (narrator)
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Edward Gardner
Reviewed by: Chris Caspell
Reviewed: 10 September, 2011
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
The 117th-Season of BBC Proms has broken box-office records and the Last Night’s opening music paid tribute to the Promenaders. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (Master of the Queen’s Music) was commissioned by The Musicians Benevolent Fund (in its 90th-year) for a musical “thank you to the Promenaders for their magnificent donations to musical charities over many years.” In the 8-minute Musica benevolens Maxwell Davies sports a style that engages from the first note. The six Fanfare Trumpeters of the Household Division, in resplendent red tunics, joined the brass of the BBC Symphony Orchestra to introduce a broad choral unison: “Benevolent music, colour and symmetry, music and harmony.” The Chorus and some in the Arena (they had rehearsed earlier in the evening) chanted a slow middle section espousing various “musical truths” drawn from Promenaders’ slogans.
Then two Promenaders (Dafydd Price-Jones and Classical Source’s very own Nick Breckenfield) flattered Sir Henry Wood (the founder of the Promenade Concerts) with the time-honoured decorating of his bust with a chaplet of laurel leaves. Edward Gardner then conducted a scintillating account of the Suite that Bartók’s prepared from The Miraculous Mandarin (more or less the first two-thirds of the score). The original ‘pantomime’ (ballet) is a sexual and violent tale that the composer anticipated being censored. The first production in 1926 lasted one performance, and the Suite was born. The buzzing of the BBCSO strings and the snapping, snarling brass portrayed the busy clamour of the city to good effect. Energetic playing by the cellos sent rosin-dust flying as part of a dynamic and exciting reading, not least in the ‘chase’ music with which the Suite ends.
If you only have time (and the stamina) to listen to one of the four music-dramas that make up Wagner’s Ring Cycle, make it Götterdämmerung, which culminates with the ‘Immolation Scene’ as Brünnhilde throws herself on a funeral pyre worthy of a hero and big enough to set alight Valhalla. Part of Wagner’s brilliance in this scene is the way that earlier Leitmotifs all return: music that represents Fire, Gold, The Hero, the Rhine, and the Rhine-Maidens. Susan Bullock has a masterful command of the role of Brünnhilde, and her powerful dramatic voice was more than equal to the BBCSO. This was an engrossing performance. How can you follow that?
Lang Lang’s appearances either side of the interval gave something of an answer. He gave a convincing if over-loud performance of the Liszt, from bland and character-less to a triumphant conclusion via a triangle-coloured scherzo that was technically brilliant if dull and rhythmically unusual at times. Sadly, Chopin’s Grande polonaise (shorn of its added-later opening Andante spianato) said more about Lang Lang the virtuoso than Chopin the composer. As an encore, a beautiful and dreamy performance of Liszt’s D flat Consolation showed that gems can be found amongst the showman’s output.
Percy Grainger’s simple block-harmonisation of My Dark-haired Maiden was pleasant and well sung by the BBC Symphony Chorus though it isn’t the best this composer has to offer. Benjamin Britten famously wrote to a friend that “I have a small film to write for the Board of Education”. The film was The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, a set of Variations and closing Fugue on a ‘hornpipe’ found in Purcell’s music for Abdelazar. At this Prom the original spoken commentary (by Eric Crozier for Malcolm Sargent) was replaced by Wendy Cope’s new text (the piece can be performed without narration). The main difference in this version is its rhyming verse, which gives a Dr Seuss-like quality that is attractive though unfamiliar. By comparison to the original, Cope’s opening seems over-long, though this was possibly not helped by Jenny Agutter’s narration, which deflected attention away from the music. The poetry that falls in between the solo sections worked well however, although the BBCSO sounded tired and unprepared for the tricky corners that Britten litters his score with. The opening – majestic and stately – was here heavy and lacked subtlety. The wonderful horn section from the first half was no longer at its peak but the percussion made up for the precision lacking in other solos. Reassembling the orchestra In the Fugue was much slicker; it romped home, instrumentalists clinging on for dear life.
The music of Hollywood movies has made resurgence in recent years at the Proms. John Wilson’s remarkable reconstructions of music used by film studios have been much acclaimed most notably for the music of Richard Rodgers to Oscar Hammerstein’s librettos. Vocalists such as Kim Criswell and Sarah Fox have reignited interest in this music through well-researched and stylistically accurate performances. Sadly the BBCSO is not the John Wilson Orchestra and Susan Bullock, for all her fantastic ability on the operatic stage, is not Sarah Fox. In the first of two Rodgers pieces – ‘Climb ev’ry mountain’ – Bullock seemed to be in a constant battle to overcome a dominating orchestra, and she was also flat and breathy. As for the new arrangement of ‘You’ll never walk alone’, with harmonisation by Stephen Jackson (Director of the BBC Symphony Chorus), as soon as Susan Bullock began to sing so did the audience, which drowned out the subtle harmonies that became more apparent in the second verse when the official chorus joined in. This was a far less triumphant version of a piece that has many meanings (a Liverpool FC flag was waved during the quiet ending). I’d like to hear this arrangement under better conditions.
The traditional ending to the Last Night followed: Elgar and Arne, with Susan Bullock dressed as a mythical heroine (a flashing breast-plate, and party-poppers in her staff), a speech by Edward Gardner (in which he thanked everyone, using three microphones in the process) and Parry’s Jerusalem in the generous orchestration by Elgar. The National Anthem was given in Britten’s hushed treatment for the opening verse. On first hearing it, in 1967, the Queen said that she had never been so affected by this national hymn, “and I’ve heard it once or twice before!” Britten’s arrangement continues to have a similar effect, this Last Night audience, regardless of nationality and colour, singing it with full voice in celebration of a spectacular season of Promenade Concerts.
Susan Bullock sings Wagner at the Last Night:
Lang Lang plays Liszt:
Lang Lang plays Liszt’s Consolation No.3:
Rule, Britannia! with Susan Bullock:
The audience sing Land of Hope and Glory:
Katherine Jenkins at the Last Night:
The heralded interventions by Berlioz may have cornered the pre-Prom chatter, but Der Freischütz is still Weber’s show. The original version (1821) helped elevate German Romanticism to the status of high art and inspired a generation of composers, Liszt and Wagner among them, towards a veneration of supernaturally-tinted bygone worlds. The plot is simple: it’s Faust with bullets; yet the ink for Goethe’s Part One was barely dry when the opera first appeared, so it is more an offshoot (no pun intended) from ancient legend than a close relative of the Mephisto tale. In his Memoirs, Hector Berlioz pays homage to Weber’s “masterpiece” and laments its treatment at the hands of the idiotic impresarios who controlled Parisian opera in his day. In presenting the ‘Berlioz version’, Sir John Eliot Gardiner dusts off a curio that the French composer only agreed to undertake for the Opéra de Paris in order to protect a work he loved from being mutilated by lesser hands. It was damage limitation rather than creative inspiration that guided his pen. Berlioz’s technical skill served him well: his recitatives, written to replace the spoken dialogue of the original, are not only faithful to Weber’s idiom but they flow imperceptibly into the arias and tighten the work’s dramatic structure. There is an unexpected residual benefit, too: Der Freischütz sounds great in French.
The cast for this 2011 Opéra Comique production (presented at the Royal Albert Hall in concert form, aside for the odd musket and a steaming kettledrum in the Wolf’s Glen) was warm-toned and free from florid histrionics. As always with Gardiner, singers had been selected not for their marquee value but for vocal type, ensemble blend and dramatic effectiveness. Most voices were on the small side, with the ’tache-twirling exception of Gidon Saks as Gaspard, an unspeakable cad who lures our hero Max (Andrew Kennedy) over to the dark side. As for Kennedy himself, he was not afraid to emphasise the weaknesses of the hapless chasseur maudit. With the exception of the vowel-chewing Saks everyone’s French diction was exemplary, even among the non-Gallic cast members, and nowhere more so than amongst the magnificent (and multi-talented) members of the Monteverdi Choir.
If the Overture began discreetly, that was clearly a dramatic decision on Gardiner’s part as his inconspicuous introduction heightened the impact of Weber’s resounding horns (and the horn-like trumpets of Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique) on their first appearance. The work as a whole was a field day for section leaders as player after player enjoyed an unbuttoned moment; and we now know why Berlioz took it upon himself to orchestrate Weber’s piano piece Invitation to the Dance, for although he slotted this interlude into Act Three with the utmost reluctance (in order to meet the Opéra’s demand for a ballet) his sure taste and musical judgement allowed it to fit seamlessly into the drama. I am not sure why Gardiner replaced this divertissement’s solo cello with massed ranks of them, but as a reading it was certainly light on its pins. Indeed, throughout the opera his brisk tempos were of a piece with Weber’s lyrical momentum and with the lean, economical libretto that rattles through its tale with brio and conviction – so that our disbelief is all but suspended until the preposterous dénouement.
An American orchestra, a Swiss conductor … what better piece to start with than Sibelius’s Finlandia, more of a national anthem for the country than the official one. Still it gave those of us still smarting (twice) from the ear-bashing that the Pittsburgh Symphony’s brass section dished out earlier in the week to find out what the Philadelphians are like in this department … and the answer is warm, rounded, golden even, and integrated as far as trumpets and trombones are concerned; these musicians don’t swamp their colleagues (and are not encouraged to), although the Philly’s horns were a bit too immediate throughout the evening and Charles Dutoit did seem to favour them. Nevertheless, whatever its current financial situation, the Philadelphia Orchestra still sounds “Fabulous” as it was branded during Eugene Ormandy’s forty-plus years as music director (1936-1980). Dutoit is not Director but Artistic Advisor and Chief Conductor (Yannick Nézet-Séguin is waiting in the wings to be an Ormandy successor, following Muti, Sawallisch and Eschenbach).
Finlandia received an exciting and touching performance. Then Janine Jansen tantalised in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, teasing the ears with restrained dynamics, inveigling the heart with seductive phrasing and exciting the senses with her volatility; quite intoxicating as Tchaikovsky’s Classical lineage met his Romantic side. Jansen offered a thoughtfully explored first-movement cadenza, the ‘Canzonetta’ was a moonlit serenade (not a million miles away from Glenn Miller) and the finale (uncut) was fiery and reflective. Throughout, Dutoit and the Philadelphians were attentive and characterful accompanists, woodwinds a constant joy. As an encore, Jansen followed Anne-Sophie Mutter (two nights earlier) by playing the ‘Sarabande’ from J. S. Bach’s D minor Partita (BWV1004), richly expressed and suggestive of time immemorial.
Rachmaninov wrote his swansong work for the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1940. Eugene Ormandy conducted and he and his Philadelphians made a great recording of it in 1960 – one that has rightness successively through it. Dutoit did it proud, too, running one movement to another (which makes musical sense and avoids intrusive applause) a continuity that underlined that this is effectively Rachmaninov’s Fourth Symphony. Dutoit nailed exactly the Non allegro marking for the first movement, trenchant rather than driven, so that when the saxophone-led wistful middle section arrived a through-line could be sustained; sultry sax-playing and tender opulent strings, too. Dutoit refused to rush at any point, rewardingly so, the second-movement waltz poised, bittersweet and lingering (haunted ballroom type of thing) and turning on a sixpence to the fluid coda that had no need to do the 100-metres dash. The extensive finale was built with organic power to Orthodox frenzy – both defiant and accepting – the nostalgic central section well-sustained and made meaningful – to complete an outstandingly perceptive performance, played from the inside.
In a Proms season with understandably its fair share of Liszt and Mahler, why not also a slot devoted to Stan Kenton – the American bandleader whose centenary falls this year. The present programme, cannily assembled and magnetically directed by Jiggs Whigham, certainly made for one of this season’s most memorable late-nighters.
Like Duke Ellington, Kenton was always searching for ways to fuse the big-band medium with the formal diversity and expressive reach then associated with classical music – one of the most potent results being Concerto to End All Concertos, with its allocation of sections and solos to steadily evolving moods whose thematic links are made explicit in a majestic apotheosis, and in which the BBC Big Band gave of its collective best. Hardly less impressive was Holman’s scintillating arrangement of Ernesto Lecuona’s Malagueña with its heady yet ominous atmosphere; after which, Martin returned for the sultry repose distilled in Holman’s arrangement of Sonny Burke’s Black Coffee, followed by the wistful elegance Lennie Niehaus brought to Billy Strayhorn’s immortal Daydream. The main set closed with El Congo Valiente – the sure highpoint of Johnny Richard’s suite Cuban Fire which, with its riotous percussion and irresistible panache, fairly brought the house down.
David Robertson rounded off his contribution to this year’s Proms with this wide-ranging concert of British music – taking in an established classic alongside the revival of an early work by a still under-appreciated master and the first UK hearing for a major contemporary figure’s rare excursion into musical abstraction.
Birtwistle has spoken of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto as an indirect catalyst in his endeavours; yet, other than overall length and the tendency (noticeable in the composer’s other orchestral works from the past decade) towards relative transparency of texture, the similarities are remote. Formally, too, this piece continues the line of ensemble interplay which has been a mainstay since his early maturity, but a sequence of five duos – each featuring the violin soloist – that run across its length offers the likely key to its underlying construction. The phrasing of the title, moreover, draws one’s attention to the consistency of the relationship between soloist and orchestra: one in which the former is always, though more than, first among equals. While this ensures a high degree of integration at all levels, it risks minimising the expressive diversity within that unity – such that the closing section, with its laconic pizzicato gestures from the violinist, feels strangely out of context and thus not the outcome of a methodical evolution. Hardly the fault of Tetzlaff, who played with keen assurance, or the BBC Symphony Orchestra which responded with alacrity to Robertson’s unforced direction – yet the impression, at least on first hearing, was of a work that represents less of a new departure than might have been supposed.
With its impressive sequence of big-name music directors and extensive foreign touring, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is an institution that has consistently punched above its weight. Manfred Honeck may not have the name-recognition of some of his predecessors but, despite straitened finances, his arrival has reportedly generated real excitement after the post-Mariss Jansons years of treading water. A sometime Abbado assistant who spent years as a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic under such as Leonard Bernstein and Lorin Maazel (the latter a Pittsburgh predecessor), he brings a wealth of insider-knowledge to his music-making and a distinctive if hyped-up Viennese/Bohemian take on expressive content. Placing his Second Violins on the right and tucking in the double basses behind the Firsts, he encourages ultra-expressive playing with generous, some would say over-generous, inflections of tempo and dynamic within the larger frame. Rubato is ubiquitous, wind solos are allowed an invasive rustic edge and there is no shortage of vibrato from the eloquent Pittsburgh strings. Good intentions then but two big problems on the night: the unblended brass section consistently dominated everything else while the longer line of the three works sometimes got lost in a welter of surface incident.
At the geographical heart of the evening the inimitable Anne-Sophie Mutter arrived in a strapless turquoise frock. Surprisingly perhaps she was not peddling her new disc of contemporary would-be classics. Instead she revived the 24-minute piece composed for her by Wolfgang Rihm in 1991 and 1992 as an on-disc partner for Berg’s Concerto. Large claims are made for Rihm as one of the important composers of his generation. His pieces are perhaps too numerous and too various for non-specialist listeners to get a proper handle on him – but Gesungene Zeit (Time chanted), a study in sonority which uses a small orchestra at first as a kind of resonating chamber for the violin, is alarmingly thin stuff and not much happens. Mutter, whose insistent, high-octane performance-style is not to all tastes, played from the score. One could only marvel as she contrived to keep Rihm’s essentially monophonic construction airborne, the high-lying violin ‘aria’ sustained with the full sonority and unending line she once claimed to have learnt from Herbert von Karajan and also attributes to the properties of her own violin. Surrounding her were a variety of special effects, too many of them sounding like the keening of hearing-aids at a Sunday morning concert at Wigmore Hall. The hum of a generator somewhere in the building accompanied the closing bars. Undaunted by cannonades of coughing and fairly lukewarm applause, Mutter played something else, the ‘Sarabande’ from the D minor Partita (BWV1004). Bach encores seem to be a new Proms ‘tradition’.
snatching at a few of the rapid descents. Both musicians missed some subtleties. Gradually things settled, and the softly voiced Andante found Tetzlaff applying more of a dolce tone. For the finale the bluster returned, though this time it suited Mozart’s Presto more appropriately, and Vogt applied some nicely shaped phrasing to the upper-register octaves.There are few niceties in the faster music of the Bartók, an incredibly muscular piece that demands much from performers and audience. The transition from the Mozart was eased by a brief chat with BBC Radio 3 presenter Catherine Bott. If conducted well these conversations provide insight into the forthcoming performance, and here the use of musical examples to illustrate Bartók’s thematic processes in the first movement was helpful, and possibly invaluable to first-time listeners.
This Prom was originally planned to include a rare performance of Frankfurt-born Walter Braunfels’s Fantastic Appearances of a Theme by Hector Berlioz, or so the Proms Prospectus for this Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra appearance suggested. Although the Braunfels (therein estimated at 47 minutes) and the Beethoven would have made for an outsize first half, such length and juxtaposition is a Proms tradition. In the event we got only snippets of the Braunfels, 15 minutes’ worth, but in a recent interview Manfred Honeck declared it a great work, yet to fit it into a Pittsburgh concert a few months ago he had made his own performing edition, timed (very precisely) at 22 minutes. But why not respect the piece and plan around the size that Braunfels made it? All Honeck did at the Proms was to conduct the 30-second ‘Introduction’, the first (Theme) and fourth Appearances (Erscheinungen) and the ‘Finale’; that’s not an edition, that’s simply taking four from fourteen sections and hacking the work to death.
Following bowdlerised Braunfels, Hélène Grimaud deliberated with Beethoven’s opening solo, and she thoughtfully modulated elsewhere while being zesty and crisp if at times ungainly – with a moment of coming off the rails in the first movement – woodwinds too deferential to the piano’s up-front timbre. She was rather uniformly pacifying in the central Andante, the strings remaining too gruff and aggressive before taking a mannered to-nothing withdrawal.
The French organ school, especially of the last century, raised improvisation to a great art, and the tradition is still flourishing with Escaich. Experience had indicated that organ improvisation, particularly in a concert, is work-in-progress, so often the triumph of style over content with a tendency to delight for rather a long time, a wow-factor technical display exploiting equally awesome instrumental facilities, but Escaich went some way to demonstrating why it might be the time to revisit that opinion. Overture in the Baroque Style was an impressive piece of pastiche, leaking into something much wilder, with echoes of Bach’s D minor Toccata (and Fugue). Escaich sometimes got stuck in a groove of particular figurations and great rolling sequences whizzing up and down the manuals, but it was a sizzling curtain-raiser nonetheless.
Sir Colin Davis may need to sit these days, but there was not a hint of frailty in this performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, nor in his vision of a work ranging from Catholic triumphalism to a melting subjectivity that would not sound out of place in Fidelio. He took quite a risk though with some very steady tempos in the ‘Gloria’ and ‘Credo’ – directions such as ma non troppo, maestoso and pesante were very much taken to heart and robbed the delirious Presto change of gear in the concluding paean of the ‘Gloria’ of its impact.
The London Symphony Orchestra responded to its former Principal Conductor and current President with a layered, refined sound, properly Classical yet full of Romantic possibility, generously fulfilled in Gordan Nikolitch’s glorious playing of the violin solo in the ‘Benedictus’. The combined choruses were superb, singing with an airy spaciousness and scant regard for Beethoven’s punishing vocal demands, and with great attention to the Latin text (rather undermining Davis‘s lament in the printed programme that Latin has become an unknown language for most people). The quartet of soloists, used predominantly with chorus-like anonymity, had few chances to shine, but Paul Groves was thrilling in the outburst in “Et homo factus est”, and Matthew Rose, always impressively musical, skilfully inflected the change of mood in the ‘Agnus Dei’. Sarah Connolly created the stillness so vital for the start of the ‘Benedictus’, and Helena Juntunen (replacing Carmen Giannattasio) gave a gleam to the ensemble.