Prom 75: The Last Night – BBCSO/Marin Alsop with Iestyn Davies, Joyce DiDonato and Nigel Kennedy
Anna Clyne
Masquerade [BBC commission: world premiere]
Wagner
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – Prelude to Act I
Bernstein
Chichester Psalms
Vaughan Williams
The Lark Ascending
Britten
The Building of the House
Massenet
Chérubin – Je suis gris! Je suis ivre!
Handel
Xerxes – Frondi tenere e belle … Ombra mai fù
Rossini
La donna del lago – Tanti affetti in tal momento
Bernstein
Candide – Overture; Make Our Garden Grow
Verdi
Nabucco – Va, pensiero
Arlen
The Wizard of Oz – Over the Rainbow
Monti
Csárdás
Londonderry Air (Danny Boy) [Traditional, arr. Chris Hazell]
Rodgers & Hammerstein
Carousel – You’ll never walk alone
Bantock
The Sea Reivers
George Lloyd
HMS Trinidad March [UK premiere of this version]
Arne
Rule, Britannia! [arr. Sargent]
Elgar
Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 in D, Op.39/1
Parry, orch. Elgar
Jerusalem
The National Anthem [arr. Britten]
Iestyn Davies (countertenor)
Nigel Kennedy (violin)
Joyce DiDonato (mezzo-soprano)
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Marin Alsop
Reviewed by: Chris Caspell
Reviewed: 7 September, 2013
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
One of the trickier tasks a musician has to master is starting a performance. The traditional overture, concerto, symphony programme offers instrumentalists, and sometimes conductors, a formula that puts the easiest piece at the start, though there are some fiendishly difficult overtures! A concert with twenty-one items, as there was for this Last Night of the Proms, is going to tax even the best-prepared ensemble, and adequate rehearsal time needs to be given to ensure that the music is not being seen for the first time in the concert itself. While this was not the case here, there were a number of places where the choir, orchestra, or both seemed ill-prepared.
The Last Night usually includes a premiere – in 2012 we had Mark Simpson’s energetic Sparks, This time Anna Clyne’s Masquerade, which draws its inspiration from mid-18th-century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens. A whirlwind of notes opens this five-minute piece – evocative of the celebration and hubbub surrounding the masquerade of the title. Overtly tonal, with hints of popular music (Clyne has worked with a wide variety of artists including Björk), Masquerade is disappointingly dull, yet Clyne’s understanding of orchestral colour is magnificent.
One of the celebrated composers this year is Wagner. The Prelude to The Mastersingers of Nuremberg had none of its vitality and warmth lost in this well-balanced performance. The intricate viola countermelody (so often underdone) that is heard below the first appearance of the love motif was here played with aplomb without belying the required tenderness. This would have been a suitable start to the concert.
Chichester Psalms was written for the 1965 Southern Cathedrals Festival (at Chichester that year) and contains some of the most difficult choral writing ever. With words entirely in Hebrew, frequently shifting time-signatures and a huge range for the tenors, this is music that requires careful preparation. A suitably declamatory opening with fortissimo brass and chorus led smoothly into the dancing 7/4 ‘Psalm 100 (Make a joyful noise unto the Lord)’. Sadly the solo vocal quartet in the first movement coda was augmented to a chamber group, losing the quality of individual voices. Leonard Bernstein noted in the score that “the soprano and alto parts are written with boys’ voices in mind. It is possible, though not preferable, to substitute women’s voices … the long male-alto solo in the second movement must not be sung by a woman, but either by a boy or a counter-tenor”. Curiously, the first performance (in New York City in fact, July 1965) was given by a mixed chorus; however performances tend to always follow the composer’s instruction for a male solo.
Countertenor Iestyn Davies gave poise and elegance to the words of ‘Psalm 23 (The Lord is my shepherd)’; however the innocence of a boy treble was missed. The sudden and contrasting ‘Psalm 2’, as the tenors and bases exalt “Why do the nations rage?”, was all but lost here. The explosive Hebrew consonants that are so important (Bernstein includes a detailed pronunciation guide in the score) were nowhere to be heard. The prelude that opens the third movement – luscious and sustained – showed the BBCSO strings at their best. Chromatic chords lead exhaustingly to the emotional climax and the harps begin a comforting ostinato to underpin Bernstein’s supine melody to words of Psalm 131, “Lord, Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty”. Here tenors and basses in unison were superb though I would have liked more from the harps. A chamber choir once again detrimentally replaced the solo quartet in this sublime corner of the work which also felt rushed and was shown to be very difficult to sing in tune, although the a cappella coda made the hair stand on the back of the neck.
However he is perceived, Nigel Kennedy has earned rock-star status in the world of classical music. Dressed like a busker on Hungerford Bridge, fist-bumping members of the cello section, he played like an angel, and there is the paradox: why, at 56 years of age, does he need to be “down with the kids”? His enthusiasm for music knows no bounds though. The opening of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending was sublime, ringing out every drop of emotion. Throughout, his tone dominated rather than floated above the orchestra – every note clear and precise, but a wispy unfocussed sound at times would have been preferable.
One of the lesser-heard of Britten’s pieces, his celebration for the opening of the Maltings at Snape in 1967 was for choir and orchestra, The Building of the House. With English words, the BBC Symphony Chorus was back on home territory in a rousing performance clear in diction and sensitive in musicality. The BBCSO was less sure about the myriad of cues given by Marin Alsop and led to half-hearted entries and a confused opening.
Joyce DiDonato then wowed the audience, first with her wardrobe (she wore three outfits altogether) and then with her confident rendition of Massenet’s ‘Je suis gris! Je suis ivre!’ (I am besotted! I am drunk!). To follow, a rather less successful outing for ‘Ombra mai fù’ (given with its recitative introduction) that sounded too big and brash. The strings, one desk removed from the back of each section, could really have had another subtracted with little ill-effect. To conclude DiDonato’s set (and the first half) one of her party pieces from Rossini’s La donna del lago. DiDonato’s distinctive vibrato was a distraction at the start; however her vocal gymnastics were quite something. She was enjoying herself; so were we.
The second half opened with a polished sequence from Bernstein’s Candide – the Overture, full of life and expectant if naïve hope and then the fabulous ‘Make Our Garden Grow’ – an anthem to common sense. The controlled crescendo that built to the a cappella climax showed Bernstein and the musicians at their best. With the Chorus warmed up came the Hebrew Slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco, the performers hanging onto every beat of Alsop’s baton as she kept control of the dynamic markings. Then back to music from the movies (we seem to have had quite a bit this year). Joyce DiDonato appeared in another dress (silver and sparkly) to sing Harold Arlen’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ from The Wizard of Oz. While not the clearest of diction here – sometimes English needs to be sung simply – it was wonderful to hear the solo voice given without amplification. Whether this was an arrangement or Harold Arlen’s own orchestration we were not told; however the score is one of the finest of the Hollywood classics.
Nigel Kennedy returned (having played across the road in Hyde Park moments earlier, one of several “Proms in the Park” events, in Belfast, Glasgow and Caerphilly, London’s line-up included Bryan Ferry, Terry Wogan and Dame Edna Everage). Sporting his beloved Aston Villa shirt (Agbonlahor’s name on the back), it seemed that Kennedy was sent back to make Marin Alsop’s life difficult. His ultra-improvisatory performance of Csárdás by possibly the original Gypsy King, Vittorio Monti, included quotes from The Four Seasons and Beethoven’s Fifth, among others, which Alsop appeared surprised by. Balloons were popped and Kennedy traded improvisatory solos with BBCSO leader Stephen Bryant in a fun-packed performance.
Chris Hazell’s arrangement of ‘Londonderry Air’ is quite different from that heard at Proms in recent years, incorporating a jaunty shanty-like tune ‘The Merry Blacksmith’, which Hazell says “was ideal, as it was a happy tune and could be woven into Danny Boy”. A more substantial and quite beautiful arrangement, Joyce DiDonato sung it for us. Richard Rodgers’s ‘You’ll never walk alone’ has a place in the hearts of Liverpool FC supporters and it is becoming a regular at the Proms too. The audience was invited to sing from the start, which was a pity as we should have heard DiDonato take the first verse and then have everyone repeat … but we all got to sing a great tune twice.
There then followed different sea-songs, starting with Granville Bantock’s The Sea Reivers – tricky rhythms, well performed; followed by George Lloyd’s HMS Trinidad March with chirping woodwinds and bobbing promenaders. And then came a well-decorated ‘Rule, Britannia!’ in the orchestration by Malcolm Sargent. Now on the home straight, the final standards without which there would no doubt be a riot opened with a hearty rendition of Pomp and Circumstance, taken at a fair pace and led nicely into Marin Alsop’s speech. She confirmed 57 sold-out performances. (Hurrah!) £82,500 earned for musical charities (Double Hurrah!) Alsop then commented that she is the first female to conduct the Last Night (more than well publicised), but other women conductors had preceded her this season, such as Sian Edwards and Xian Zhang, and indeed Marin herself (Prom 47), and JoAnn Falletta last year: Alsop was shocked that in 2013 there are still firsts for women. Then a plea that music and art cannot be pushed to the margins – I fear that Alsop is preaching to the converted as music-services teaching in British schools has all but disappeared.
To end, the audience was on its collective feet in a rousing and emotional finale to the 2013 season of BBC Proms – Hubert Parry’s Jerusalem as orchestrated by Elgar, Britten’s hushed arrangement of the National Anthem and a final chorus of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
Klaus Sonnleitner is the latest successor to Anton Bruckner as organist at the monastery of St Florian (in Linz, Austria). And Bruckner once gave several recitals on the Royal Albert Hall organ. Bruckner greatly admired J. S. Bach’s music, so it was apt that some of the latter’s pieces for the instrument should share this penultimate Prom of the season with Bruckner’s monumental Eighth Symphony.
The occasional fallibility aside, this was a burnished and intense traversal ignited by Maazel’s magnetic personality and through the Vienna Philharmonic’s innate way with this music. Maazel should not be thought predictable in this work; his Berlin recording now fits a single disc; his Bavarian version does not; this Proms performance lasted for a rounded 90 minutes that in turn knocked several minutes off a reading he gave with the LSO in November 2004. Yet timings are mere statistics (if not damn lies) and give no clue as to the ingredients of what happened on the night. So with the Vienna Philharmonic we had a first movement that leant more to Bruckner’s moderato than to his allegro, but it was generously laid out and gloriously brassy and the coda’s disillusionment was chilling. And if the scherzo was short on locomotion it certainly didn’t lack for trenchancy, with some pastel-shaded pianissimos tickling the ears; the trio emerged as a country dance with moments of reverie: ah, if only we’d had the third harp that Bruckner so politely asks for, it’s a single part, then these instruments’ arabesques would have been a little fuller in sonority. (It’s rare that you see a music-stand in front of Maazel; typically he was without a score, but in its place he was grateful for the bottle of water and a glass just within reach for some refreshment.)
Imogen Cooper and Paul Lewis are close friends, with Alfred Brendel mutual, for whom the music of Schubert is held dear. With the composer’s music lending itself to late-night listening, this was an ideal match of musicians and repertoire.
The ‘Grand Duo’ is one of Schubert’s biggest works for piano/four hands, but Cooper and Paul Lewis opted to play it on two pianos so that each could use the pedals. The piece is notably less ‘domestic’ than other works Schubert wrote for this medium; it’s on an orchestral scale, which Joseph Joachim made reality when arranging it in 1855. Symphonic it certainly was here, although both pianists were at pains to keep the intimate discourse of Schubert’s melodies. Imposing gestures did appear, most notably in the hunting fanfares of the third movement, but the trio took a very different turn, mysterious and elusive as a frown descended over the music’s countenance. From the off, things had been amicable, the music having moved to C major. Cooper and Lewis interpreted the first-movement Allegro moderato as closer to the Andante of the second, but thanks to concentrated delivery the pianists ensured success. In the finale Cooper in particular enjoyed the staccato delivery of the folksy tune, the music tripping along with joyous freedom. The friends delighted in the intimacy of their music-making, almost unaware that there was an audience eavesdropping on their every note!
Giuseppe Verdi has not done as well during this year’s Proms as his bicentennial buddy Richard Wagner. Even playing on a neutral ground in Kensington, a complete-opera score of 7-0 is a runaway victory for the German. Nevertheless, on the last lap of the season a Verdi-dominant first half to this concert was secured. Xian Zhang pounced straightaway with a stealthy and exciting Overture to The Force of Destiny (real back-of-the-net stuff), edgily lyrical if just a bit too lachrymose, albeit recognisably Italianate. Then the trump card was played, Joseph Calleja (Maltese flags waved) introduced as an on-loan striker who you would want in your team every week. He spearheaded the attack, scoring with some classic arias, vividly communicative without force or strain, ardent and inviting in all he did, pretty good at drama, declamation and deep feeling, too. Not so convincing in ‘La donna è mobile’ though, all a bit smiley, lacking other tenors’ command of the Duke’s cynical seduction technique, and although Calleja (who has been favourably likened to Mario Lanza) is to be congratulated for avoiding showmanship by not holding-on-long to notes, or making them higher, or adding in twiddly bits, one came away feeling that variety of characterisation is not his strongest suit.
This year’s Proms term has featured a Tchaikovsky Symphony cycle: only right and proper that the masterly Manfred should be included (it mostly isn’t). Written between those numbered as 4 and 5, Tchaikovsky turned to Byron for inspiration. The result is one of his greatest works and some of his most sophisticated scoring.
To balance the jolly japes we can expect from the Last Night, the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s penultimate Prom focused on death, with or without hope. And if that seems a great distance to cover, the playing styles in the three works conjured by Osmo Vänskä was so marked that there could have been a different orchestra for each one.
Ruby Hughes, a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, pitched the songs perfectly between drama and detached reverence, her sparing use of portamento and vibrato adding considerably to the music’s impact, and she magically floated her silvery voice out of the orchestra into the audience. Vänskä was equally in command of the muted orchestra colours, so that the introduction of winds and harp in the first movement made maximum but discreet impression, and the piano and harp in the close of the last one added a starry shimmer of implied hope in this otherwise desolate work. The performance held us spellbound for an hour – give or take weedy dribbles of applause between movements – but it felt timeless.
This late-night Prom juxtaposed works by two British composers whose centenaries fall this year. That of Benjamin Britten has been extensively celebrated, whereas that of George Lloyd has been largely the preserve of those enterprising performers who operate at the margins of the music scene. Further comparisons were prompted by the pieces chosen: when that by Britten was premiered its composer had not yet graduated, whereas Lloyd had laid the basis of a promising symphonic and, before long, operatic career; when that by Lloyd was premiered, his feted contemporary had been dead for over two decades and Lloyd himself had merely months to live – his music having enjoyed a modest yet solid revival.
In his later years, George Lloyd spoke laconically yet unappreciatively of Britten – whose innate Englishness could hardly have found favour with one who saw himself as the belated representative of a musical Romanticism with such as Berlioz and Verdi at its centre. While the three operas and twelve symphonies constitute the backbone of Lloyd’s output, choral music came to the fore in his later years – of which the Requiem (1998) is a comparatively modest though wholly characteristic addition. The dedication to the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, moreover, can only partially conceal the fact that Lloyd wrote it in the knowledge that this was to be his last work and set its formal as well as expressive parameters with such in mind.
Norway put its best foot forward when the Oslo Philharmonic was joined for its second Prom this season by Christian Ihle Hadland, the pianist from Stavanger – and a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist of distinction. Equally effective as soloist, chamber musician and accompanist, Hadland is prodigiously gifted, graced with a refined technique and expressive subtlety that isn’t immediately signalled by his owlish, benign persona. Refinement was very much to the fore, both from Hadland and the Oslo PO’s new conductor Vasily Petrenko, in Beethoven’s B flat Piano Concerto, but they also added an infectious vitality to remind us that rhythm was the force leading Beethoven away from the classical poise of Haydn and Mozart towards romanticism.
I much enjoyed the sly wit with which the antique-sounding contrapuntalism at the start of the first-movement cadenza expanded into earthy ebullience, and his lead-out from this solo moment was played with exemplary tact. Hadland’s innate understanding of the scale of the Concerto – all the more surprising given that this was also his Royal Albert Hall debut – glowed through the intimate reverie in the Adagio, and regrouped for a bustling, conversational finale. Petrenko could not have been more flexible and supportive, directing the Oslo musicians to allow Hadland’s wondrous playing to flow to maximum effect. The pianist’s encore – a ‘Galliard’ by William Byrd from My Ladye Nevells Booke – was a nicely judged nod to Englishness and played with obvious delight in and understanding of its renaissance idiom.
In a year holding major anniversaries for Britten, Lutosławski, Verdi and Wagner, this final Proms Chamber Music recital of the season was given over to a celebration of another anniversary-composer. 2013 marks 450 years since the birth of John Dowland, perhaps best known for the melancholic moods of his Lachrimae antiquae and ‘In darkness let me dwell’. This lunchtime concert embraced this aspect of Dowland’s music, combining it with cheerier fare to offer a balanced picture of the composer’s output. Thus, Ian Bostridge and lutenist Elizabeth Kenny joined the viol consort Fretwork to celebrate him.
performance of Farewell Fancy. Each contrapuntal line was clearly defined and she lent a sense of anguish to Dowland’s searching sequences. With Fretwork and Bostridge for ‘My thoughts are winged with hopes’, the tenor’s performance had a sense of confidential confession to it, adding an intimacy which belied his projection.
were undeniably luscious, but lacked some emotional depth. This was righted with ‘I saw my lady weep’, in which Bostridge’s use of sotto voce was most effective. A few of his lower notes were once again slightly approximated, but the emotional depth compensated. ‘If my complaints could passions move’ saw Bostridge explore a wide range of sentiments, with the ensemble responding to his fervor in the second stanza.
Vasily Petrenko has just added the conductorship of the Oslo Philharmonic to his credits (he continues to roll along as Chief Conductor of the Royal Liverpool PO and he is also Principal Conductor of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain).
There was unevenness too in Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances (1940), written for Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra who made an untouchable recording in 1960. Under Petrenko the first movement was too fast, and not just because the marking is Non allegro, attacks lacked bite (if not from the bass drum) and the saxophone-led central section was rather cool. Petrenko’s handling of the second movement was intriguing, a danse macabre flexibly paced, a ‘haunted ballroom’ of a slow waltz; but, some ear-catching hushed playing aside, it also seemed that Petrenko was vacillating as to just what his view of this music is. Even with the finale as fleet, sure-footed and vividly detailed as it was, the last degree of impassioned fire was missing, that sense of riding to the abyss and with no return journey possible, Petrenko’s conducting just a little precipitate. What to do with the textural conundrum that is the final gong stroke – cut it off fiercely (Ormandy) or let it ring on (Petrenko)? – is made redundant if impatient hands make too-early applause.
With autumn still on leave of absence, here was a Prom of contrasting summer moods: lowering and sepia before the interval, sunny and primary-colour-saturated thereafter. Estonian Paavo Järvi and the Orchestre de Paris, of which he is music director, presented an attractive, predominantly Anglo-French programme to a packed audience whose entente was never less than cordiale.
The Cantus was an inspired mood-setter for Britten’s Violin Concerto which, in Janine Jansen’s precise yet expressive reading, emphasised the music’s mournful quality. The Dutch soloist’s sound was small, her tone sweet, and her approach romantic yet never saccharine nor sentimental. The refinement of her playing was exquisite – a plucked string was like a pebble skimming on a pond – yet she brought an epic virtuosity to the cadenza that links the second and third movements. Maybe Jansen’s interpretation of the finale was too contained, although first impressions can be deceptive. Her pacing of this closing ‘Passacaglia’ was calm and restful at first, like a lullaby, but as it progressed her instrument’s smile became fixed until, torn between major and minor, it howled its desperation into fetid air.
After the interval the Parisian players shed their English brogues and got the oxygen pumping with a dash through Berlioz’s euphoric Le Corsaire. After that, endorphins coursing, they launched headlong into the ever-popular Third Symphony of Saint-Saëns. While there may have been a few missed turnings in Järvi’s sometimes hard-driven reading (the strings tended to lose definition in rapid passages), his musicians fizzed. The Orchestre de Paris has a warm sound these days: mellow, homogeneous strings and brass that is neither strident nor over-ripe – and, in Frédéric Macarez, a heroic timpanist. Thierry Escaich’s registrations can hardly be blamed for a Royal Albert Hall organ that wheezed asthmatically in the Poco adagio second movement. On the other hand he attacked the rumbustious finale with a massive mechanical sound that came close to drowning out even the trumpets. Splashes and all, it was quite a ride.