Prom 6: BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena – A Vision of the Sea & Inextinguishable Symphony – Nobuyuki Tsujii plays Rachmaninov
David Matthews
A Vision of the Sea [BBC commission: world premiere]
Rachmaninov
Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor, Op.18
Nielsen
Symphony No.4, Op.29 (The Inextinguishable)
Nobuyuki Tsujii (piano)
BBC Philharmonic
Juanjo Mena
Reviewed by: Colin Anderson
Reviewed: 16 July, 2013
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
On its first outing, David Matthews’s A Vision of the Sea (2013) made a big impact. Impressively scored for a standard large orchestra, including harp and piano, this 22-minute symphonic poem is engaging on a purely musical level as well as a suggestive one. From its mysterious opening to a conclusion that seeks no easy resolution, leaving the listener (this one anyway) with the impression that dangers remain lurking in the depths, Matthews has filled his score with much engaging invention, sometimes with a nod (intended or otherwise) to Ralph Vaughan Williams; whether subtle and evocative, richly melodic, pictorial (including the onomatopoeia of gulls), or tempestuous, so lucid is its design that A Vision of the Sea could be described as a ‘symphony in one movement’; the trill-encrusted climax was thrilling. This first performance seemed wholly excellent, the composer, recently turned 70, and very much in the English romantic tradition, appeared very happy with the result.
The 24-year-old Japanese pianist, Nobuyuki Tsujii, has been blind from birth. Quite how he studies and learns the repertoire he plays, and also so effortlessly locates the keys he needs to negotiate, is to be wondered at. His opening solo of the Rachmaninov (so associated with David Lean’s film of Brief Encounter) was expectantly solemn, with no split chords, and he went on to give a sparkling, considered and very musical account, neither pushy nor dominant. He was sensitively and tactfully accompanied, save that the brass was often too loud, and the cymbals crashes in the finale were crude. (Les Siècles much missed!) Juanjo Mena was a caring steward when helping Tsujii to walk on and off the platform. The pianist offered an encore, a dashing and ringing ‘La campanella’, the third of Liszt’s Paganini Etudes.
Balance problems also blighted Nielsen’s ‘Inextinguishable’ Symphony, which at its brassiest (quite often) these instruments blared and obscured much detail from elsewhere in the orchestra. Although Mena (the BBC Philharmonic’s Chief Conductor) had worked things out painstakingly, his tempos proved too deliberate, undermining the music’s thrust. If there were some engaging moments – the woodwinds in the second movements, the solo strings in the third, and some splendid timpanists in the finale – a generally rather studied approach to the work made it less engaging than usual (and Nielsen 4 is a masterpiece), the implication being that Mena likes the music’s surface but is indifferent to the composer’s life-enhancing inspiration and indestructible intentions. Two years ago at this address, Sakari Oramo conducted the Stockholm Philharmonic in a fully identified-with reading that found the mind wandering back to then and to how engrossing and uplifting this music can be.
There could be no doubting the fervour; nor the general reception to this, the first-ever Gospel Prom. There were some 200 singers, mostly dressed in black but with some shock of colour. Four Gospel Choirs were to the front, with the massed university choruses with Morley College and the B.I.G. Choir, organised by British Gospel Arts, arrayed behind. The programme had sensibly been divided into six sections, tracing the history of Gospel singing – Spirituals, British Caribbean Hymns, Traditional American Gospel Songs, British Contemporary Gospel Songs, African Praise Songs and Inspirational Gospel Songs – many of which featured solo choirs (if that’s not a contradiction in terms), before a massed medley.
Perhaps appropriately, I am an alumnus of University College London (“the Godless of Gower Street”), so there was no way that this Prom was “preaching to the converted” as far as I am concerned. But I went with an open mind, especially as I had very much enjoyed the a cappella Spirituals in the current National Theatre production of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, featuring none-other than the London Community Gospel Choir, whose members contributed to this Prom’s ‘Traditional American Gospel Songs’ and ‘British Contemporary Gospel Songs’ sections. But I’m afraid I was not a convert.
The 2013 Proms season promises its share of musical subversion real or imagined, but few pieces are likely to prove more subversive than Helmut Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied (1980) which received its belated UK premiere here – at least to judge from the bemused demeanour of those members of the (mainly programme-less) audience in the left-side stalls.
It was measure of the conviction in this performance (given in the presence of the composer, born 1935) that such expectations were not only fulfilled but also wholly transcended. It helped that the Arditti Quartet met with ease the challenges – singular to be sure, though also highly systematic and never outlandish – of technical requirements which in themselves seek to go beyond, rather than merely denying or defacing, the supposed conventions of Western art music. As the ‘Preamble’ unfolded, it becomes clear that the give-and-take between these larger and smaller ensembles is precisely what the work’s subtitle ‘Music for orchestra with string quartet’ implies it to be. Jonathan Nott sustained an unwavering momentum across the whole, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra players managing effortlessly the alternating passages of greater and lesser activity – through to a ‘Coda’ whose laconic reiteration of inert syllables is the more affecting for its very restraint. The judicious use of the requested amplification for the string quartet vividly separated and opened out the interplay of sound sources to make explicit in space what was occurring over time.
From music which questions the audience’s very purpose to that which has, albeit unwittingly, become a means of said audience celebrating the cult of itself. Now among the most played works in the repertoire, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (1902) was given a reading that, though it did not strive to present the piece afresh, brought out its combative interplay between convention and reinvention along with those formal and expressive subtleties which are too often at a premium nowadays. The opening ‘Trauermarsch’ had a keen yet also supple intensity, its impassioned development and baleful coda made the more meaningful for their understatement, while the ‘Stürmisch bewegt’ movement that (rightly) followed attacca was more than usually an extended sequence of variations on its predecessor’s main ideas – such passages as the sustained span of polyphony for lower strings and the fragmentary coda being persuasively as well as precisely rendered.
The BBC Proms Chamber Music recitals (every Monday lunchtime during the season) commenced in refreshing style, in both performance and atmosphere. The cool and light space of Cadogan Hall was the very antidote to the gruelling heat of the first weekend in the Royal Albert Hall base, and this recital delivered music-making of beguiling intensity.
Frang was not quite at ease with the ‘Blues’ idiom of the second movement, seeming more comfortable with spiky interplay with her partner and the ‘Perpetuum mobile’ finale featured some brilliantly conversational exchanges.
![Doctor Who Prom 2013 [Prom 2]. Photograph: BBC/Chris Christodoulou](/wp-content/uploads/11215_1.jpg "Doctor Who Prom 2013 [Prom 2]. Photograph: BBC/Chris Christodoulou")
Even before we had left the tube station to walk to the Royal Albert Hall, I began to hear people talking about the upcoming event with great anticipation and excitement. As we approached the great building, I saw more tweed jackets, bow-ties, Tom Baker scarves, and fezzes, than I’ve seen in a long time. After we collected the tickets and programme, well produced by Gemma Doyle in the shape of the TARDIS with an opening front to reveal the console, we made our way to our seats and watched the screens as the spotlights and cameras picked out a variety of Doctor Who fanatics, including one man who tried to stop every monster that entered the pit.![Doctor Who Prom 2013 [Prom 2]. Photograph: BBC/Chris Christodoulou](/wp-content/uploads/11214_5.jpg "Doctor Who Prom 2013 [Prom 2]. Photograph: BBC/Chris Christodoulou")
The arrival of Peter Davison and the very first companion, Carole Ann Ford, halfway added a notable 50th-anniversary dimension. It was nice to see a past Doctor from, as he put it himself, the “classic” times, as it all started 35 years before I was born. For the last generation and even the generation before, I imagine that it brought back fond memories of hiding behind the sofa. The music was a good mix of Gold and classical, which was mostly accompanied by video, either extracts, or compilations from classic and modern episodes, shown on screens situated around the Hall. As well as these pieces, there were also two pieces written by the “Create a Soundtrack” competition winners, which were written as accompaniments to an excerpt from the Christmas special, “The Snowmen”.
An instrument for every occasion! On Bastille Day, Les Siècles (a French orchestra with its French founder-conductor) brought along various such apparatuses from different centuries to match the music that its members were playing, culminating with The Rite of Spring, not only with the ‘right’ instruments, similar to those that informed the premiere in Paris in 1913, but also with François-Xavier Roth’s forensic examination of Stravinsky’s original manuscript and contemporaneous two-piano version, compared with subsequent revisions, and taking us back to what the divided-in-opinion first-night audience heard on 29 May in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
With a change of string instruments, and bows, it was then to later, Romantic, scores and two masters of their craft. The snippets from Léo Delibes’s Coppélia ballet (1870) proved quite delightful with the varied and noticeably different instrumental sounds, pertinent to this period of French composition; so warm and well-balanced; not a strident note. The ‘Waltz’ and ‘Mazurka’ both had swing, and good to see a distinction made between pairs of cornets and pairs of trumpets. The ballet music from Jules Massenet’s opera Le Cid (1885) is a gem (a shame we were denied all of it, though). This was a perfectly judged and affectionate account, full of life and detail, on a par with Jean Martinon’s marvellous Decca recording with the Israel Philharmonic (and there is no higher compliment).
We’ve been here before – in 2008 and 2010 – when two of the BBC’s biggest brands, the Proms and Doctor Who, collide together in the Royal Albert Hall. In 2008 David Tennant had to beam his presence in from Stratford (where he was under contract with the RSC as Hamlet). New Doctor, Matt Smith, popped up for 2010. This year – celebrating the 50th-anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who (23 November 1963 – the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination) – we had two Doctors as, greeted by an audible gasp of recognition from a packed Hall, Peter Davison was a surprise guest.
And then there were the monsters. For us veterans of Doctor Who Proms we knew what to expect, but the power of his enemies is just as rejuvenating as The Doctor himself. New this year were The Whisperers, with their white faces and ghostly gaping mouths; The Silence, which featured throughout Matt Smith’s first series, who frankly makes The Whisperers seem normal; and an Ice Warrior that broke out of its frosty cocoon in the Arena. That subterranean opening also disgorged slinky, reptilian Silurians, first seen on a spiral wrought-iron staircase that was important to the Christmas show where we met The Doctor’s latest companion, Clara; a Weeping Angel (don’t blink!); and, of course, a master Dalek … not forgetting the rhino-like Judoon, Cybermen, Vampire Girls (from Venice), with audience squeals as the monsters approached.
But there was one major difference to the previous two Doctor Who Proms – this contained only music that had appeared on-screen. Yes there were classical pieces – ‘Habanera’ from Bizet’s Carmen (from Asylum of the Daleks, this last series), J. S. Bach’s (if written by him!) Toccata (only the Toccata, no Fugue) from BWV565, in Stokowski’s orchestration (Colin Baker, in 1985, managed to transform the Tardis into an organ, on which the Bach was played – perhaps incongruously in Attack of the Cybermen), and Debussy’s ‘Girl With the Flaxen Hair’ (from Book I of the piano Préludes) originally re-imagined by Dudley Simpson – in the audience – and Brian Hodgson, for 1977’s The Robots of Death with the longest-serving Doctor, Tom Baker – 004) – but all but two pieces of the remainder of the programme were from Doctor Who’s house-composer Murray Gold.
Clayton (in full costume as a disciple of Akhaten – from the second of the most recent Who series) was joined by young Kerry Ingram for the song to placate an angry sun, and Ingram was not the only youngster involved. Winners of the “Create a Soundtrack” competition heard their entries, as orchestrated by Ben Foster, given their first outings, accompanying climactic scenes from the 2012 Christmas special, The Snowmen. The senior winners (14-16) were Gabe Stone and Matthew Owen from Gloucestershire and the junior winners (11-14) were William Davenport and Jordan Picken from Stoke-on-Trent; they obviously have good ears for pacing and contrast.
Behold the Proms! This bumper part-oceanic package launched (imagine a bottle of champers hitting a ship’s stern) the 2013 Season, opening with the eager anticipation to hear something new. Julian Anderson’s Harmony (2013) gave us six minutes of eternity courtesy of a text by the 19th-century writer Richard Jefferies. It opens with the most fragile of sounds, then comes a distant call from the past frozen musically in the present tense, a Stravinskian skill (clarinet quips further adding this composer’s presence), the BBC Symphony Chorus (only) lamenting “I could not enter time…”, the music shadow-dancing to pizzicatos and voluble in its emotions. Harmony, which fades to nothingness and stops, made a compelling if disorienting entrée.
Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody needs no introduction, an ingenious set of variations, deft, colourful and richly articulated. Stephen Hough is a master of the solo part and engaged it with intelligence and enjoyment, and also brought the old-world charm and flexibility that make his appearances so distinctive; the famous Variation XVIII was dreamily romantic, captivatingly gentle, its eventual soaring integrated to the whole. Oramo and the BBCSO gave detailed and cooperative support, and this thoughtful account opened up the potential of the music rather than running with its virtuosity. Hough’s built-in encore was the Lutosławski (another centenarian), an early work from 1941 for two pianos that he and fellow-composer Panufnik played in occupied Poland; only in 1978 did Lutosławski make this arrangement. Crunchier in its Paganini commentaries than the Rachmaninov, this short (seven-minute) divertissement is somewhat quixotic, even irreverent – folksy, spiky and jazzy – Hough delighted to have it under his fingers, one sensed, with conductor and orchestra alive to its brilliance and peculiarities.