The birthdays of Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, both of whom turn 80 in 2014, is one of the major focuses of this year’s Proms. Each has a complete Proms Portrait matinee concerts in Cadogan Hall dedicated to their music on August 30 (Davies) and September 6 (Birtwistle), and Davies’s birthday, on September 8, is marked with a late night Prom in the Albert Hall. Unfortunately I will not be around for any of those concerts, but I have heard other concerts marking the birthdays.

On August 9, in Cadogan Hall on a Saturday matinee concert combined the birthday strand with another theme of this summer’s Proms, presenting orchestras new to the festival and from far afield. The Lapland Chamber Orchestra, conducted by John Storgårds, presented a concert which included Birtwistle’s Endless Parade, with Håkan Hardenberger as the trumpet solo, and Davies’s Sinfonia. The Birtwistle, for trumpet with vibraphone and strings, written in 1987 for Hardenberger, was intended by Birtwistle, who had, he said in the short discussion before the performance, cubism on his mind, as a study in discontinuity, cross cutting six kinds of music, with different tempi, figuration, and textures, in disconnected and apparently illogical ways. Birtwistle also apparently had Stan Kenton on his mind, and there is from time to time a sort of whiff of jazziness in the music, although that may be as much an effect of the sound of the vibraphone as the actual notes.

The Davies Sinfonia was written in 1962, after he had studied in Italy with Petrassi, but before he had gone to Princeton to study with Sessions and before he had begun work on Taverner, the central work of his early career. It was written under the influence of the Monteverdi Vespers and makes use of procedures from that work. The work is in Davies’s earlier, post-Webernesque Euoprean modernist style, but nonetheless has in it the beginnings of the isorythmic cantus firmus procedures that one recognizes in slightly later and possibly more characteristic piece such as Antechrist.

Both of these works received very strong, very strongly characterized, and highly persuasive performances. The concert began with a Symphony by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and also offered, between the Birtwistle and Davies, Honegger’s Pastorale d’été, and ended with Rakastava by Sibelius, a very beautiful piece for strings and percussion, of whose existence prior to this concert I had been completely unaware.

Storgårds conducted the BBC Philharmonic on August 14 in Proms concert at Albert Hall that featured Davies’s Fifth Symphony, along with works of Sibelius (Finlandia and the Second Symphony) and Frank Bridge (Oration for ‘cello and orchestra, with Leonard Elschenbroich as the soloist). Written in 1994, when Davies performing career had moved from working with The Fires of London to conducting orchestras, mainly the BBC Philharmonic and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Symphony is in one movement and reflects Davies’s involvement at the time with the Sibelius Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, which had figured in his repertory. The Symphony which at first seems to be in discontinuous shards, consists of the braiding of a fast music with increasing intensity and emphaticness and an equally impassioned and forward moving slow music with a motionless music providing moments of stasis in the overall progress, which in certain respects resembles the arc of the Sibelius Seventh Symphony. It is a highly dramatic piece and it received a very dramatic and impassioned, although somewhat under-shaped performance. This Prom was preceded by a Composer Portrait concert at the Royal College of Music in which Davies talked to Andrew McGregor about his chamber works Antechrist, Runes from a Holy Island, and Six Sorano Variants, which were given excellent performances by Musicians of the London Sinfonietta Academy.

Two nights earlier The BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Thomas Søndergård, presented the suite from the second act of Davies’s ballet Caroline Mathilde, along with the Violin Concerto of William Walton and more music of Sibelius, The Swan of Tuonela and the Fifth Symphony. Walton’s rather elegant and glamorous concerto is just the sort of piece that one would have written for Heifetz, who, in fact, commissioned it and gave its first performance, and it received a suitably luxurious performance from James Ehnes. Davies’s ballet is about the misadventures and eventual downfall of the title character, the sister of George III of England who, at the age of 15, was married to the Danish king Christian VII and who became the lover of his person physician, with attendant unfortunate personal and political consequences. The music from the ballet is, compared to more austere and abstract works such as the Fifth Symphony, relatively easy listening and depicts fairly clearly the story line of the choreography. The performance mirrored the clarity and sonorous beauty of the orchestral writing.

Davies’s birthday is also being celebrated by other festivals. The North York Moors Chamber Music Festival in North Yorkshire between August 24 and August 30 features a work by him on each of their concerts. I heard the concert on August 25 in the beautiful Victorian Gothic Church of St. Helen’s and All Saint’s, in Wykeham, in which the Quartetto di Cremona began the concert with the Beethoven Quartet, Op. 74 and ended it with Davies’s 6th Naxos Quartet. In the between another quartet, consisting of Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay, Simone Brown, Meghan Cassidy, and Jaimie Walton played the Berg Lyric Suite. The 6th Naxos Quartet is a big, thirty minute long, impassioned piece which interpolates into a fairly traditional four movement layout, two short “arrangements” of plainsong hymns for the third Sunday of Advent and for Christmas Day, the day the piece was finished. All of the performances on this concert were outstanding.

The Proms was also marking the 80th birthday of the British born American composer Bernard Rands with the first UK performance of his Piano Concerto performed by Jonathan Biss and the BBC Scottish Orchestra, conducted by Markus Stenz. The Concerto is an imposing work which presents the soloist as a predominant member of the ensemble rather than, as Paul Conway’s program note said, “a protagonist striving heroically for supremacy over massed accompanying forces.” After a bright and lively first movement, entitled Fantasia, the second and third movements, were not clearly enough differentiated, especially in terms of tempo, as opposed to speed of figuration, to remain as separate impressions on this listeners memory.

On August 17, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Andrew Manze presented a concert entitled “Lest We Forget,” to commemorate the centennial of the First World War. The first half consisted of works written by composers who died in the war. The German composer Rudi Stephan (1887-1915), who died in the trenches of Galicia on the eastern front, was represented by Music For Orchestra from 1912, which was steeped in the language of late German romantics particularly Strauss. The Elegy for Strings in memoriam Rupert Brooke (who had himself died in the Navy in the war) by Frederick Kelly (1881-1916), who died in the last phase of the battle of the Somme, reflects more of the language of Debussy. Both of these works were indications of great potential as yet unrealized, especially the Stephan. A much stronger and more personal impression was made by the Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ by George Butterworth (1885-1916), who also died on the Somme. He was a more fully developed composer, and several of his works, including these songs, which he wrote with piano accompaniment, but were performed here in a orchestration by Phillip Brookes, are fairly well known and not infrequently performed. Two of them, Loveliest of Trees, and The Lads In Their Hundreds, are, I think, particularly good. They were sung, more of less perfectly, by the baritone Roderick Williams, with a beautiful sound and perfect British English diction; it is hard to imagine anyone ever doing them better. The concert ended with the Vaughan Williams Third Symphony, written after the war, but formed by his experiences as an ambulance driver in France during the conflict. I was very excited to hear this piece, which I’ve know since I was in high school, but had never heard live. The performance was all that one could wish for. There were a number of other Vaughan Williams pieces on the Prom presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo, on August 13: The Overture to the Wasps, The Lark Ascending, and his big ballet (or as he called it ‘a masque for dancing’) Job. These performances were rather less radiant than that of the Symphony, but they did bring to mind what a very good composer Vaughan Williams was, and, especially in pieces like Job, people often don’t remember, a modernist.

All of the Proms concerts can be heard at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007v097/episodes/player

Not only is it hard to describe Benedict Mason’s Meld, which was given it’s first performance on the late night Prom given by the Aurora Orchestra and the choral group Chantage, conducted by Nicholas Collon, on August 16, it’s hard even beginning to think about how to describe it. All of the advance notices of the concert were particularly, and unusually, vague about the details of the work, and even the program claimed to be not at liberty to divulge much information about it. In the concert itself, which began with the Mozart 40th Symphony (played from memory) and also included Dobrinka Tabakova’s Spinning a Yarn, a short and very attractive piece for violin and hurdy-gurdy, played (also from memory) from the organ loft by Alexandra Wood and Stevie Wishart, the fact that something was up was indicated by the emptiness of the arena and gallery of the Albert Hall, the domain of the promenaders. One noticed a number of people who are continually there as promenaders in very good seats in the stalls.

Once it was underway it was clear that Meld was going to use all of the Albert Hall, up, down, inside, and out. It began with a mysterious and halting throbbing music coming from some place outside of the hall which turned into a march for a parade of players across the gallery at the top of the hall. Suddenly there were four bass players in the lower tier of boxes, echoing a group of ‘cellos and basses in the gallery, and then, suddenly without one having noticed their getting there at all, the entire upper tier of boxes was filled with pairs of players and singers, who sent volleys of pizzicato notes ricocheting around the hall, succeeded by skittering and scurrying flurries of notes. After a period of time when different kinds of groups with different instrumentation would seem to simply appear in lots of different places, a bevy of horns started moving over the arena area and the stage, and eventually through the audience, followed by other people, playing various percussion instruments, sometimes moving very fast, pursuing, as the poet says, urgent voluntary errands. Then there were some small groups of players in the arena, seemingly menaced (I’m not sure if there’s another word for it) by one or two people wearing some kind of stoles of clacking blocks. The sequence of events is somewhat hazy in the memory, although the events themselves were striking and memorable. During all of this, the music–the actual notes being played–which had a fairly high level of complexity, was always full of detail and held one’s interest.

After a while the delight and excitement about what would happen next began to ebb somewhat, but not so much that anything ever got, for lack of a better word, boring. I found myself, though, wondering about what the shape of the piece being presented in this all enveloping environment and its structural argument might be. I was reminded of a place in the final scene of The Years by Virginia Woolf where one of the characters asks herself whether, if one could get far enough above life, one might be able to see a pattern in it. After a while longer I found myself thinking of another Woolf and wondering if Meld wasn’t a pageant, in some ways like the pageant in Between the Acts, including in its outlining some kind of (unspecified–in the case of the Mason) loosely historical progression. Pageants are a series of more or less static and not necessarily closely connected tableaux whose larger scale succession, thematic in some way, but not plot based, rather than the immediate flow of the individual moments give the work’s structure and continuity. At some points in Meld we seemed to be in fact offered some kind of excerpts of a pageant, in the bit with the clacking stoles, and also in a segment where most of the chorus and some players coalesced in the arena, first rolling balls of some kind and appearing to play some kind of game (cricket?), then formed several small groups doing what appeared to be some kind of folk dancing, and then made one big ring around the perimeter, before forming two groups that then sat for a few moments in seats in opposite sides of the stalls, muttering. At a certain point one began to wonder when and how it was all going to end, and eventually it did, but I can’t remember how, although I think it was more with a whimper than a bang.

There was never any point in this almost hour long work which was not engaging or at which the material, musical or otherwise, seemed anything less than first class. The performance, by 93 players and 49 singers, was astounding–completely committed and assured. They were playing without music, although everybody seemed to have receivers and earphones, and some of them seemed to be wearing cameras, so its hard to know exactly what information they were getting from that. The program listed a person responsible for staging and choreography (Mason), a movement director (Chris Tutor), and two people who did a click-track (Felix Bastian Dreher and Griff Hewis). The work involved in planning and executing the whole effort must have been mammoth, and it was brilliantly accomplished.

The recording of this Prom is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04dqbhv.

For sixteen years now the BBC, as one of its many activities connected with the Proms, has run a program which it calls Inspire, comprising of a competition and several workshops for composers between the ages of 12 and 18. On this last Sunday, composer Fraser Trainer, who chaired the committee of judges for the competition, led a workshop for about two dozen young composers whose activities were related to the works on that night’s Prom, which was presented by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Trainer was joined by six artist instrumentalists, violinist Anna Smith, saxophone player Simon Haram, double bass player Ben Markland, trumpeter Bruce Nockles, percussionist Hugh Wilkinson, and flutist Rosanna Ter-Berg, who began the day as colleagues of the participants and by the end of the day were performers of works that had been written for them in the afternoon. The day began with the whole group, extemporaneously working out elements of a short piece which they performed with clapping, stomping, and finger snapping, followed by smaller groups, this time using instruments, devising works more specifically focused. In the afternoon each of the composer wrote a short duo for some combination of the artists performers which were read at the end of the day. The level of musical sophistication of the participants was impressive, as was the quality of music played at the end of the day, which they had produced in very little time. There are two other workshops to follow focused on electo-acoustic music and popular music arranging, each also connected to a Proms concert. There is also a concert of the competition winners on the August 20.

In the time between the two sessions of the Inspire day, at King’s Place, at another end of central London, Jane Manning was conducting another kind of workshop, billed as Jane’s Contemporary Clinic, as part of the annual festival of Tete a Tete Opera Festival, during the course of which she sight read excerpts of operatic and vocal works which had been submitted that morning. She was assisted by the composer and pianist James Young. Manning read music of fearsome complexity both of pitch and of rhythm with the unflappable ease and performance-ready accuracy of someone who regularly does six impossible things before breakfast, offering comments of great intelligence, insight, and common sense with down-to-earth simplicity, and displaying a simply astounding technical command and beauty of sound.

That night the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Edward Gardner, presented a concert including Petrushka by Stravinsky (in the original version) and the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra, which along with Sonance Severance 2000 by Harrision Birtwistle, some of whose compositional issues had provided the focus for the earlier Inspire workshop. The orchestra, as many youth orchestras tend to be, was enormous, and seemed to have twice as many of everything as scores called for. The sound they made was large and rich and beautiful and in the final tableau of the Stravinsky was enough to bring tears of joy (which the music does anyway). The number of players, though, was no impediment to realizing either the accuracy of the playing or the intricacy or clarity of ensemble work.

There must have been a good reason for putting the Birtwistle piece at the beginning of the second half of the concert, rather than at the very beginning where it belonged, but it’s not clear what it might be. Commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra for the reopening of their home, Severance Hall in January of 2000, it is a three minute elaborate flourish, conceived of by Birtwistle as a sort of call to arms, or sonance, for consisting of a series of waves of sound welling up through the orchestra, with abrupt halts (or severance) of the sound, most especially at the very end, where after a big crash, prolonged by a tam-tam, is followed by a four note trumpet call.

The Lutoslawski, written in the earlier years Poland’s post war communist government and in the wake of the banning of his First Symphony on the grounds of its ‘formalism,’ is an imposing bravura display piece, both for the orchestra and the composer, steeped in Polish folk music and clearly modeled after the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. It has a structure of considerable intricacy, so one wonders if it was merely the folky melodic qualities that kept it from being declared formalistic. Earlier in the concert the orchestra was joined with Louis Schwizgebel in a performance of the Prokfiev First Piano Concerto.

Earlier in the week another Youth Orchestra, the European Union Youth Orchestra, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, persented a concert consisting of the Berio Sinfonia and the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony. This orchestra is a very fine group and has a very high technical level. One couldn’t fault their playing at all. However the performance of the Berio was a great disappointment. The Berio is undoubtedly the archetypal 60s piece and is a sort of rock star among pieces, and, for me, at least, its quality and glamor and importance and breath-taking beauty are undiminished. This performance has several aspects which mitigated its full effect, though. First of all the amplification of the voices was too high. The idea seemed to be to try to make all the words audible all of the time, as opposed to the voices being a part of the general texture with occasional words and phrases coming through to the surface. In the second movement, the jabbed notes were not sufficiently loud enough and different enough from the rest of the music to make the texture clear, so its effect was of a certain aimlessness. The performance of the third movement, on its immediate surface didn’t have the swing and liveliness that one would hope for in a performance of the Mahler which is its shell. On top of the there was the balance problem with the voices, and there seemed to be no recognition of, and certainly no attempt to bring out, the various quotations that flow through it. So basically what one got was a sort of not terribly energetic, not terrible well differentiated mush. The Shostakovich, which is a much more traditional piece, got a more satisfactory performance, but still lacked the clarity of texture and desperate life and death intensity of dynamics and general affect to make it really memorable. In all of this the level of playing was never anything other than first rate. I think the fault was in our Petrenko.

The Proms concerts are available for listening at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b043b491/clips

A reminder of the muscular, haunting style of Peter Schulthorpe, who passed away a couple of days ago.