On the 18th and 19th of August Dave Smith’s 75th birthday was celebrated at Café Oto with two concerts of his music, performed by Jan Steele, Janet Sherbourne, and himself. Each concert began with Smith, who is an extremely masterly pianist performing works of his, and concluded with Steele and Sherbourne performing his major work, Albanian Summer.
Albanian Summer was written in 1980 for Steele and Sherbourne, and performed widely by them for a while. These performances were the first in about 30 years. The work is a sort of travelog of a number of summers that Smith spent in Albania in the 1970s, and includes over its approximately 45 minute duration evocations of Albanian bagpipes (which is how the piece starts), Albanian Communist “anthems,” folksongs, and dances. On both evenings it was engaging and enjoyable and rousing. The performances were completely compelling.
The first concert began with Smith playing three quite substantial works. On the Virtues of Flowers, a half hour long piece, celebrates the therapeutic and restorative powers of flowers as part of a treatment of hospital patients, and was written for a concert by John Tilbury to mark the 30th anniversary of a hospital of the West Sussex Health Authority. The sort of jazzy meditative music which begins and ends the work frames what might be described as post minimalist fast and flashy material. The other two works on the concert were shorter and possibly more dynamic pieces, which were originally intended as parts of a set (Smith has written a number of evening long sequences of sorter pieces which he calls piano concerts), that he says “never materialized.” Nails is forceful and hard as. All This and Less came together as a reaction to a review of a concert of music by friends and associates of Smith’s by Nicholas Kenyon in the Financial Times in 1979: “Satie without the wit; Ravel without the grace; Cage without the silence; Rakhmaninov without the tunes: the recent music of Gavin Bryars and John White is all this, and less.”
The second evening’s concert began with Smith playing fourteen pieces from his First Piano Concert. The Concert was a reaction to the more than one hundred tangos that were written by many composers, including Smith, for the Tango Project of Yvar Mikhashoff. Hearing one of Mikhashoff’s “Tango Marathons” at the Almeida Festival in 1985, Smith thought that “it was apparent that many of the featured composers had not seriously engaged with any form of tango.” In reaction he wrote a set of 24 pieces for piano, each 3 to 4 minutes long, each one “relating to specific musical genres or piano playing styles, western or non-western, well-known or obscure, real or imagined.” The fourteen played on this concert included as well as a tango and a bossa nova, a Charleston, a Calypso, and Hokey Cokey, and some vaguer forms: Afterhours, Nocturne, and Avash Avash (which is an arrangement of a section of Albanian Summer.) Smith’s playing in both evenings was powerful and satisfying.
Both of the concerts were, to put it one way, well attended, or, to put it another way, mobbed; and both were full of the joviality that one would expect from a birthday party. So not only did they offer the opportunity to experience a sizable and satisfying sampling of a serious and impressive composer’s work, they also were a festive celebration of that composer’s accomplishments.
The Prom on August 10 was presented by The National Youth Orchestra, conducted by Alexandre Bloch and Tess Jackson. The 160 members of the orchestra, who completely filled the stage, were joined by the almost as large cohort of NYO Inspire, who were in various places in the hall, including the gallery, some boxes, the choir seating areas behind the stage, and, eventually, in the aisles of the stalls. The program began with the Overture to The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner, and concluded with the Symphony No. 1 of Gustav Mahler. In between those were two works, Orpheus Undone by Missy Mazzoli and Three, Four, AND… by Dani Howard , which was a BBC co-commission, receiving its first performance.
The Mazzoli, written in 2020, is, of course, concerned with the Orpheus story, which, as Mazzoli said in an interview for the Chicago Symphony, where she was composer-in-residence, “has been told a million times.” The present work was based on material from her earlier (2019) ballet about the Orpheus story, Orpheus Alive. Mazzoli said that Oprheus Undone “focuses on a very specific, small moment of the story, right when Eurydice has died and gone to the underworld, and has left Orpheus.” Steve Smith, in his program note for the Proms concert, speculates that there, in fact, might be more it: he thinks that the piece is concerned with “how, in times of trauma, time comes unstuck; sped up to a frenetic pace and slowed to near stasis seemingly at once.” The beginning of the first part of the piece, entitled ‘Behold the Machine, O Death,’ is marked by a regularly repeating wood block beats against which are strands of other music suggesting varying other tempos. The beats of the wood block disappear and periodically recur, but the pulse it marked seems constant in various ways, playing out against the opposing pulses, suggesting the variability of the perception of time. The second section, entitled ‘We of Violence, We Endure,’ suggest the pondering of an event in its aftermath, and is marked by piano figuration, wandering and eventually melting into the greater orchestral texture, which then fades away. All of this is very effective and moving and was performed with enormous understanding and commitment by the orchestra, conducted by Bloch.
Three, Four, AND… by Dani Howard, who was during the time of its composition the NYO’s resident artist, was written with a fair amount of input and interaction with the orchestra’s members, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of NYO Inspire. Howard wrote a tune called As One, which members were encourage to make their version of and record and upload. During the orchestra’s spring residency members made suggestions as to things they would like to see included in this piece, which was composed specifically for the Proms concert. The original tune and those requests were incorporated into the final work. Three, Four, AND… is an ebulliently optimistic work, offering a kaleidoscopic array of different very effective orchestral textures, some including unusual sound effects, expertly shaped to reveal the next cohort of musicians, leading to the concluding climax. The orchestra was conducted in this work by Jackson.
The concert concluded with a masterful performance of the Mahler First Symphony and a really staggeringly wonderful encore (which can be found at about 2:11:36 in the recording of the concert). It would be hard to oversell the many awesome qualities of the concert, which was brimming with playing that was as accurate and precise as one could ever hope for and at the same time so full of commitment and enthusiasm. The recording of this concert can be found for a limited time at ttps://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021r1f.
The late-night Prom on August 9, presented by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment, conducted by Chloe Rooke, was devoted to a single work, Songs of Wars I Have Seen by Heiner Goebbels. The work was written in 2007 for those same two groups, on commission from the Southbank Centre, for the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall after its two year-long renovation. Songs of Wars I Have Seen is based on Gertrude Stein’s book detailing her life in occupied France during World War II. The ins and outs of how Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, two openly Jewish lesbians, survived more or less unscathed in a country controlled by Germans, where Jews were steadily being deported to concentration camps (examined in great detail by Janet Malcolm in an article in The New Yorker— https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/06/02/gertrude-steins-war) is not dealt with in Goebble’s work directly, as it isn’t in Stein’s book. Here the subject matter is the concerns of day to day existence in a war-torn environment controlled by occupiers. The part of Stein’s narrative which is used in this work is also concerned with comparisons between the current war she is living through with earlier wars she has experienced, and even more with the presentation of wars and their effects in Shakespeare’s plays, which Stein and Toklas were reading aloud with friends during that time. These two time frames are presented in musical terms: the modern day concerns are presented with, as it were, “modern” music, while the discussion of the concern of wars in Shakespeare plays are represented with music of Matthew Locke’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, although that music may sometimes have a sort of overlay of mechanical noises, making the immediate situation inescapable. The text is always spoken by players, usually individually, but occasionally as a group. The players of modern instruments are not separated from the players of period instruments, but there is a separation of genders. In this performance the women were on the main part of the stage, surrounded by old style standing and table top lamps, as though at home. Around the top perimeter of the stage there was a line of male musicians, playing mostly brass and percussion instruments, who didn’t speak.
The quotidian nature of life in war is set off immediately by a discourse on honey and its replacement of sugar, which quickly becomes unobtainable in conditions of war. Later in the piece meetings with strangers and the fact of the full moon and the notion of going away or being taken away and the fact of pets and children in ones household and the differences of radio announcement in the broadcasters of different countries are also discussed, but all of these details of daily life are always considered against the usually unspoken consciousness of the potentially calamitous events that could be produced at any minute by the war in progress. The shape of the work is never articulated in a dramatic way, in keeping with the overarching concern with day to day life in wartime. But the progress of the work is sure and convincing and always engaging, and one is led eventually to considering that after a war, nobody wants to eat honey because it’s too sweet. The work ends with a statement that a war is over when everybody’s had enough of it, followed by a trumpet solo over the sound of prayer bowls, which is a combination of a lament and a sad fanfare.
Songs of Wars I have seen is a very intricate and demanding work, requiring not only very expert players playing very difficult and demanding music, but very very expert sound production as well. It’s hard to imagine a better performance that the one presented here. The recording of this performance can be heard on the BBC Sounds website (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021k0w) for a limited time.
The BBC Prom on August 7 was presented by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by John Storgårds. It featured Stefan Dohr as soloist in the Horn Concerto by Hans Abrahamsen, written between 2018 and 2019. The work is mostly a monologue by the soloist which is provided with a luminous and quite beautiful backdrop, sometimes reactive and interactive, and sometimes just a background, but always aurally compelling. Although the movements are designated by tempo, they are really differentiated more by the density of the, as it were, accompaniment than by the actually speed of the music. At the end of the work, the orchestra joins the soloist in the argument of the piece, before everything recedes into the glowing distance. The performance of the concerto was on the level that it deserved. It was all quite beautiful and effective.
The Abrahamsen was proceeded on the concert by Schumann’s Genoveva Overture and Pohjola’s Daughter by Sibelius, and was followed by an absolutely barn-burning and unforgettable performance of Tschaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.
The Prom on August 9, which was presented by The BBC Symphony and their chief conductor Sakari Oramo, began with a performance of Mirage by Kaiji Saariaho, with Silja Aalto, soprano, and Anssi Karttunen, ‘cellist, as soloists. Mirage sets a poem by the Mexican shaman and poet Maria Sabina. (1894-1985). Sabina’s “poems” were actually trans-like utterances from her healing sacred mushroom ceremonies, called veladas. She is generally regarded as a masterful oral poet due to her presentation of traditional native Mexican themes in a uniquely person voice. For Saariaho, Sabina was an example of an exceptional female artist whose work was a powerful proclamation of her existence as a uniquely powerful creator. Mirage features the soprano voice singing Sabina’s text (in English, in a translation by Alvaro Estrada), but its way is prepared by the ‘cello part, which then intertwines with it, supported and amplified by the orchestra. In a way the work is a sort of recreation of the trance which produced the poem. The effect of the whole, with more forceful and less diaphanous and ethereal music than one usually expects from Saaariaho, emphasizes the concept, as articulated in the program notes by Pirkko Moisala, of “the identity of a mature woman and artist who has found her voice and accepted her calling.” It was completely compelling. The Saariaho was followed by performances of Mozart’s K. 271 Piano Concerto, with soloist Seong-Jin Cho, and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony.
The Prom on August 8, presented by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Anja Bilhmaler, was originally to have contained the first performance of beyond the beyond, by Sarah Gibson, which was a BBC Commission. At the time of her death from cancer in July of this year, the piece was incomplete. It is to be finished by her associate Thomas Kotcheff and will be performed at a later date. In its place, the program contained an earlier orchestral work of Gibson’s, warp and weft, of 2021. warp and weft is a tribute to the artist Miram Schapiro, whose work emphasizes what she called “femmage,” which is to say artistic work formerly practiced mainly by women, for instance decoupage and weaving, which were formerly considered “cafts” or “decorative art,” as opposed to the “high” arts, which were supposedly practiced mainly by men, and were, therefore, considered superior. In warp and weft, the weft, the horizontal axis of the loom, is associated with more melodic elements, and the warp, the vertical axis of the loom, deals with more harmonic aspects, and these two aspects basically alternate, finally, at the end of the piece, coalesce in a lively and appealing music. Gibson’s program note says that she imagined the piece as a sort of representation of Schapiro’s studio, “…a place full of color, with various materials and ideas, swirling around…” That is a fairly accurate description of the qualities of the work. In the concert the Gibson was preceded by the Beethoven Violin Concerto, with the admirable Tobias Feldman, as soloist, and followed by a compelling performance of the Brahms Fourth Symphony.
All of the proms are available for about sixty days after the date of the concert, on the BBC Sounds site, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b007v097.
One of the focuses of this year’s Proms, concentrated during the month of August, was the centennial of György Ligeti. The first of these, presented on August 11 by The London Philharmonic Orchestra, along with the London Philharmonic Choir, the Royal Northern College of Music Chamber Choir, and the Edvard Grieg Kor, conducted by Edward Gardner, started in what might be the most obvious place, especially for drawing a large audience, focusing on the music used in Stanley Kurbrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The movie certainly introduced Liget’s music to a larger audience than it had ever received before that time, and made him a sort of star, both of in new music circles and in the world at large. This concert included Ligeti’s Requiem and Lux Aeterna, and ended, inevitably, with Also sprach Zarathrustra by Richard Strauss. Robert Stein’s program note asserted that Ligeti’s Requiem, composed from 1963 to 1965, was an unexpected next piece to follow his Poèm symphonique, for 100 metronomes, of 1962, but in fact the micropolyphony of the choral and orchestra work is a pretty exact recreation of the texture produced by many metronomes clicking away simultaneously. In the Requiem, Ligeti aligns that micropolyphonic texture with a quite remarkable and highly personal sense of register and orchestral color, producing a new and striking musical character at just about every moment. The Lux Aeterna, for 16-part unaccompanied chorus, written in 1966, which was performed by the Edvard Grieg Kor, is more concentrated and refined, and even more striking, being a distillation and, if you like, condensation of the Requiem for sixteen unaccompanied voices. All of the performances were beyond reproach.
The Prom on August 15, presented by the Royal Philharmonic, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, started with Lotano by Ligeti. Written in 1967, Lotano is in the vein of the Requiem and Lux Aeterna, but concentrates on luminous orchestration. Lontano was followed by the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto, with Alexandre Kantorow, as soloist, in what seemed to me to be the best performance of anything I’d ever heard, Kantorow, as an encore, delivered a radiant performance of somebody’s arrangement of the Finale from The Firebird. The concert ended with the Shostakovich Tenth Symphony, written in 1953. Shostakovich had suffered serious humiliation and oppression during the later 1940s and early 1950, a certain amount of it aimed directly at him by Stalin. During that time he wrote a number of pieces which he simply didn’t release, realizing that they would cause him even more trouble. Stalin’s death in March of 1953 was a source of relief for the composer, and the Symphony seems to be a powerful expression both of that relief and its attendant relative freedom, as well as a reflection on aspects of the situation. The second movement, which is a relentless and caustic scherzo is said to be a portrait of Stalin. The performance of the piece was vivid and powerful. The whole concert was unforgettable.
The Prom on the evening of August 13 was presented by The Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted by Iván Fischer, on the heels of their Audience Choice Proms that afternoon, in which the audience chose the program by vote as it went along, working from a menu provided to them. The evening began with Mysteries of the Macabre by Ligeti, an excerpt from his opera Le Grand Macabre, consisting of an aria for the Chief of the Secret Political Police, arranged by Elgar Howarth. The soloist for this was Anna-Lena Elbert, who, as was appropriate to the music it dramatic situation in the opera, was all over the stage, in a manner just as frenetic as the music she was singing. She was singing in German, but the text came think and fast and relentlessly, so one wasn’t able to actually get any words at all, which didn’t in any way detract from the absurd and funny effect of the piece. This was followed by Béla Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto, with Sir András Schiff as soloist. It received a lovely and heartfelt performance, as was appropriate to the valedictory nature of the piece. The concert concluded with the Beethoven Third Symphony. The playing all the way through the concert was as good as one could have ever expected.
The impression that Ligeti was presented only as the composer of his modernist, micropolyphonic, Space Odyssey music was rectified by the Prom on August 20, presented by Les Sièles and its conductor François-Xavier Roth. This concert included the Concert Românesc, representing the highly polished Bartokian music, infused with folk-like material, that Ligeti wrote before he fled Hungary for the west in 1956 and the Violin Concerto of 1989-93, with soloist Isabelle Faust, which gave full evidence of the highly multifaceted, multisourced and, at least for this listener, more fully satisfying music that he was writing toward the end of his life. The character of the two works and the progress and shape of each, are not dissimilar, even though the later piece is freer in its incorporation of different tunings and more ‘exotic’ instruments, such as ocarina and swanee whistles. It conveys the sense of Ligeti as a continually inquiring and endlessly curious musical personality. Les Siècles specializes in playing instruments and tunings appropriate to the particular repertory they are performing, so the Ligeti pieces on the first half of the concert were performed on modern instruments tuned to A=442Hz; the Mozart works on the second half of the concert, the 23rd Piano Concerto, with soloist Aleander Melnikov, and the 41st Symphony, were performed on Classical-period instruments tuned to A=430Hz.
All of these concerts can be heard on the BBC Sounds website.
The late night Prom on August 9, was billed as Mindful Mix Prom. It was presented by Ola Gjello, along with Ruby Aspinall, the Carducci String Quartet, and VOCES8. It was a little difficult initially for one to know exactly what one was in store for. The advanced material invited one to “relax into a late night musical meditation” which would explore “the universal, timeless themes of night, stillness and prayer through the lens of composers old and new,” with a playlist that “drifts from Renaissance to Radiohead.” In a Proms program for an earlier concert, Tom Service’s “The Proms Listening Service” had promised “carefully curated music designed to put us in a hypnotic nocturnal reverie.” Among the composers listed in this Prom’s program, aside from Gjello, were Caroline Shaw, Philip Glass, Roxanna Panufnik (with a work commissioned by the BBC for this concert), Ken Burton, Jake Runestad, Eric Whitacre, and Samuel Barber–also William Byrd. The program advised that the listed order was subject to change and that there would be improvisations by Gjello interspersed among the other works. Since the approximately hour and fifteen minutes duration of Prom was filled with continuous music and the program said that the order listed was not necessarily the order in which works would be performed, it was difficult to tell exactly what one was hearing at any one point of the performance. There were hints, of course: For instance Caroline Shaw’s piece and the swallows was presented with “a new violin solo by Christopher Moore.” So when there was a violinist standing in the midst of the singers, one could have probably safely assume that one was hearing the Shaw (the program did not list the names of the members of the Carducci Quartet, so one might have assumed that Chistopher Moore was the person playing–in fact it was Matthew Denton, the quartet’s first violinist–that information the product of later research). The harpist, Ruby Aspinall, played only in one piece near the end; that might have been the Panufnik’s Floral Tribute, setting a poem by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II (just guessing, since maybe the fact that it was the commissioned piece would justify bringing in one player for only that piece). It was clear that the end of the program was the Barber, the choral version of Adagio for Strings as an Agnus Dei, which was played by the Carduccis and sung by VOCES8. There was also, over the whole length of the performance, a rather elaborate light show, which this listener did not find soothing, since it made the program hard to read and made it even more difficult to figure out where one might have been in the program. The answer provided by the evidence of the concert to the question “what is mindful mix” though was, apparently, “easy listening.”
Despite complaints, it was clear immediately and through the duration that the playing and singing was really first class and really beautiful and one could be very mindful of and thankful for that.
The Prom on August 8 was presented by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the London Symphony Chorus upper voices, conducted by Jaime Martin. The major work on the first half of the concert was the Violin Concerto by Grace Williams, with soloist Geneva Lewis, which was receiving its first Proms performance. The work is in three movements and last about half an hour. It is filled with rhapsodic music which features very clear and compelling long lines. Its orchestration is clear and rich and varied, and the writing for the soloist is very effective. Its tempo and texture over the three movements, though, is very unvaried, so that, in the end, there’s very little differentiation at all, and this listener, anyway, was unable to remember any point in the piece more than any other point, or follow any sort of argument, despite the beauty and effectiveness of any one of the moments. It was preceded in the concert by an Overture, written in 1919 by Dora Pejačević, a composer I’d never heard of before, who is being featured on this year’s Proms, in observance of the centennial of her death. A member of the Hungarian and Croatian aristocracy, Pejačević, according to the program “resolutely rejected an easy path for herself” and pursed a career as a composer (she is said to be the first Croatian composer to write a piano concerto). The overture is lively and appealing and makes one eager to hear more or her music. The language and orchestration are not too far away from that of Holst’s The Planets, written two years earlier, which was the second half of the concert. The audience, which packed out the house, was clearly there for the Holst, and they applauded and cheered loudly and lustily and long after every movement. There was some good reason for this, as the performance was tremendous, as were the performance of the other two pieces.
These Proms and all the others can be heard at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m001nh6k
The Prom on August 26 was presented by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and their conductor, Nicholas Collon, joined by violinist Pekka Kuusisto. The program opened with La Mer by Debussy, which was given an extremely shaped and nuanced and always beautiful sounding performance. It was followed by Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending in a very beautiful and thoughtful and very quiet and moving performance featuring Kuusisto. The Vaughan Williams and Märchentänze by Thomas Adès made a very interesting and thought provoking paring. The Vaughan Williams, written just before the first world war, was one of his first works to deal with his interest in English folksong. It incorporated the essence of his experience of folk music into the substance of the piece, not quoting any particular folksongs but having the sense of that music permeate the whole of the work. The Adès, which was written in 2020 for violin and piano and was orchestrated a year later, and was receiving its first UK performances, quotes quite a few particular folksongs explicitly, and deals with them as found material which can be used and manipulated but whose substance is not part of the essential character and concerns of the music, and is always held at an emotional distance, always quotation, always ironic. The work is always expertly, to say the least, realized and brilliantly orchestrated and always engaging and entertaining. The performance was on an equally expert and compelling level. Both of those performances–the Vaughan Williams and the Adès–were completely true to the character and intent of the music. The concert concluded with a completely spellbinding performance of the Sibelius Fifth Symphony.
The Prom on August 30 was an single hour-long work, This New Noise, by Public Service Broadcasting, (actually the program credited J. Willgoose, Esq. as the composer and JF Abraham as the arranger) a London-based musical group, described in the program as being ‘indie-rock,’ whose four members are known by their stage names: J. Willgoose, Esq, Wrigglesworth, J F Abraham, and Mr.B, assisted by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jules Buckley. Public Service Broadcasting incorporates archival recordings, news and otherwise, visual clips, and their own original music, which is somewhat poppy and repetitive, in their work, which might be considered collage-like. Their works, including their debut ‘album’ Inform– Educate– Entertain, The Race for Space (marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing), and Every Valley (on the rise and fall of the Welsh coal-mining industry), have won prizes, including the Progressive Music Awards, and have developed a large and enthusiastic following, at least judging from the completely packed out Albert Hall.
This New Noise, a BBC commission, receiving its first performance, was a celebration of the centennial of the BBC, and consisted of eight sections: Ripples in the Ether (Towards the Infinite, This New Noise, An Unusual Man, A Cello Sings in Daventry, Broadcasting House, The Microphone (The Fleet is Lit Up), A Candle Which Will Not Be Put Out, and What of the Future?. There was little, if any, manipulation of the archival recordings (in some of there other work, which I looked into later, there was some manipulation); sometimes the music underscored, as it were, moments in those clips and sometime it simply provided an underlay. The archival visual elements were also presented more or less intact. None of the sections actually ended; they just stopped. After a while this became a little irritating, but it made one very aware that there was really no shaping at all to any of the piece, the music didn’t at all provide this, is simply went on, usually very repetitively.
The whole work was intended as a celebration of the BBC and a warning not to let it go away. There was a very powerful statement by Wilgoose in the program: “It is, in my view, a simple and unarguable fact that if the BBC continues to be whittled away–potentially until it expires–there will be many areas it covers, and functions it provides, that will simply cease to be. No private organization, motivated by profit alone {he had previously quoted a statement by James Murdock at the Edinburgh International Television Festival of 2009: ‘The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.’}, would fund the BBC Proms season; nor Radio 3, nor 4, nor 6 Music (without whose patronage our band wouldn’t exist); nor the BBC orchestras (including the one performing so skillfully tonight); nor any of the multiple commercially unappealing but culturally vital services the BBC provided to us on a daily basis for what–when compared with other much lauded delivery systems–amounts to a pittance. It will leave a vacuum, a void; there will be no more ripples in the ether, no more public-minded attempts to improve the education and experience (and cohesion) of this country. There will simply be an empty stage, and perhaps the scale of the BBC’s influence and importance will only be truly felt if it does disappear.” The end of the whole evening acted out, in farewell symphony manner, the prophecy of the empty stage. It was possibly the most effective moment of the piece. Nothing else came up to that, and none of it equaled the power of Wilgoose’s prose.
The Proms on August 22 was billed as Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul. It commemorated the eightieth anniversary of Franklin’s birth, and her death four years ago, and featured Sheléa, along with a group billed as Gospel choir, led by Vula Malinga, none of whose members were named, and the apparently newly formed Jules Buckley Orchestra, conducted by Jules Buckley. The evening included seventeen songs representing just about every facet of Aretha’s career and repertory. Sheléa was personable hostess for the show, as well as being a formidable singer, who was certainly up to the task of evoking Franklin’s presence through her songs. During the second half of the concert, when Sheléa was making her third costume change, the Gospel choir performed Spanish Harlem and Day Dreaming and the individual singers, uncredited, proved that they could claim and hold a stage as well. The whole evening was completely enjoyable. The object of the evening, of course, was to evoke Aretha by covering her songs in her manner. One of her great talents was to cover songs by other singers and to so make them her own and they were at least as powerful and memorable as the originals, sometimes better. Even though it’s something of an aside and unnecessary I am adding here a list of what I think are the very best Aretha covers, in order: Long and Winding Road (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oz1qZljz4), The Tracks of My Tears (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XJfYpeCr4s), Oh Me Oh My (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMrVtFmVrcU), The Border Song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-8e9WINAho), Brand New Me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmJRsdYXAg0), I Say a Little Prayer for You (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8y0onSG3kg), April Fools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trNhaxZvFVk).
All three of these concerts are available on the BBC Sounds website (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds), as are the concerts I wrote about earlier. In fact, every Prom is there, and available for quite a long time.
The Prom on Monday, August 15, presented by the BBC Symphony, conducted by Sakari Oramo, opened with the first UK performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Time Flies, a joint Commission from the BBC, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra which is based in Hamburg. Each of the three movements represents one of the cities involved, London, Hamburg, and Tokyo, respectively. The piece is for a very large orchestra, used with a certain amount of skill and verve. The London movement is fast, and, so we’re told, jaunty in an English kind of way; the second is slower and more solemn and serious and a little overly long, as, one supposes, fits Hamburg. The last movement is jazzy and swinging, as is supposed to accurately represent Tokyo (?), All three of the movements operate on the basis of asserting material, fragmenting it and then subjecting it to canonic treatment–-at great length– especially in the last movement Across the whole piece one struggles to find any hint of substance. Tracing two other threads for this Prom season, that of concertos for unusual solo instruments, and the celebration of the 150 anniversary of the birth of Vaughan Williams, the second work on the program was the Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto, with Constatin Hartwig soloist. The concerto is a late work, and it has all those hallmarks; a lovely folksy slow movement and a snappy last movement that has been described (by Michael Kennedy, I think) as being Bottom and the fairies. Constatin Hartwig’s playing was, to put it mildly, admirable; he added as an encore a very very fancy arrangement by Lars Holmgaard of Blackbird by Paul McCartney. The concert concluded with a very moving performance of the First Symphony of Elgar.
The Prom on August 16, presented by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, opened with Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, in the version that, a long time ago used to be the only version, for full orchestra, lasting just under half an hour, the sort of suite, not the whole ballet. The concert ended with the Fifth Symphony of Prokofiev. In between those two pieces was the Trombone Concerto by George Walker, with soloist Peter Moore. The concerto is in three movements and last about seventeen minutes. The first movement pits a lively propulsive rhythmic music against a more singing material, leading to a climax that highlights the singing quality of the trombone, before sliding back into the initial faster rhythmic music. The second movement, relatively short, is completely singing and heartfelt. The final movement’s initial and dominant quality is cheerful and march-like, and it continually interrupted by a more aggressive, jerkier, slightly syncopated music, with the first music winning out. The concerto is not only a very impressive show piece for the trombone, but it is continually engaging as a piece of music. Moore, whose performance was a knock out, played as an encore Clef Study No. 18, by David Uber.
Ethel Smyth is known more as a sort of blip on Virginia Woolf’s biography ( “An old woman of 71 has fallen in love with me…It is like being caught up by a giant crab.”) than as one of the most important British suffragettes or as a composer. She was, in fact, not only a quite accomplished composer, but a fairly important one. The Prom on August 20, presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus, conducted by Sakari Oramo, featured Smyth’s Mass in D major, following the Debussy Nocturnes. Tovey compared the Smyth Mass favorably to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, and it is of a similar scope and length. That Smyth intended it not as music that could actually be used liturgically, but rather as a grand oratorio on the text of the mass is proved by the fact that she felt that in its liturgical order the mass doesn’t have a splashy enough ending and, therefore, decided to move the Gloria to the end of the piece. In any case, although it maybe does go on a little too long, the Mass is fairly impressive. The orchestration is consistently luminous, and there are one or two really striking and wonderful moments, most especially in the Gloria when the four soloists are suddenly singing the Domine Fili unigenite unaccompanied. The Kyrie, which was a slowly unfolding closely argued span leading to a substantial climax, is also impressive. The performance was as fully committed and as good as one could ever hope to hear.
On August 21 at Café Oto, Tania Caroline Chen performed Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories. Feldman described the piece and its workings: “In Triadic Memories… there is a section of different types of chords where each chord is slowly repeated. One chord might be repeated three times, another seven or eight – depending on how long I felt it should go on. Quite soon into a new chord I would forget the reiterated chord before it. I then reconstructed the entire section: rearranging its earlier progression and changing the number or times a particular chord was repeated. This way of working was a conscious attempt at “formalizing” a disorientation of memory…” Chen’s performance was completely engrossing and compelling, soon after it started causing one to stop noticing and forget over its 90 or so minutes’ length the obvious deficiencies of the piano it was being played on. It was a memorable experience.
Prom 37, presented by the Royal Northern Sinfonia, conducted by Dinis Sousa, was a late morning concert. It included a performance of the Oboe Concerto by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with soloist Nicholas Daniel, which was part of a thread for the season featuring concertos for less usual solo instruments as well as being part of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s birth. The concerto is in three movements and is relatively brief–19 minutes. It’s also musically quite concise (except maybe for the last movement) and as well conceived for the instrument as one could wish. It’s a lovely piece, with all the good and bad connotations of that description. The performance was as good as one could ever hope to hear. The program also included an arrangement of an arrangement of the final aria of Kaija Saariaho’s fist opera, L’amour de loin, from 2000. The first arrangement, entitled Vers toi qui es si loin, made by the composer in 2016, was a more straightforward excerpting of the aria for soprano with a reduced orchestration of strings, harp, and piccolo. The second arrangement–same title– which she made in 2018, presented here, recast the soprano part for solo violin, and allows an even greater sense of distance and musical space. The piece is, in fact, magical, and that quality was enhanced by the playing of the soloist, Maria Wloszczowska, who was also the leader (i.e. concertmaster) of the orchestra. In this concert it was followed without a break with the Beethoven Fourth Symphony. The playing of the Royal Norther Sinfonia all the way through the concert, which opened with the Haydn Sixth Symphony, was strikingly beautiful.
The Prom later that night, presented by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Santtu-Matias Rouvali, was maybe the most egregious example of sticking a modern piece in between two crowd-pleasers, maybe hoping that the audience won’t notice. The concert started with twenty five minutes of excerpts from Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky and ended, after intermission, by forty-five minutes of excerpts from Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev. (In an interview included in the program, Rouvali said he thought the programming of the ballet music would ‘fit well with that kind of audience and setting,’ which aside from being condescending, seems to reflect a lack of knowledge of the history and traditions of the Proms.) After the Tchaikovsky and before intermission, Jennifer Koh and the orchestra played the first European performance of the Violin Concerto ‘Procession’ of Missy Mazzoli, which was a BBC co-commission with the National Symphony Orchestra (of Washington, D. C.), and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Given the placement of the concerto in terms of the repertory of the concert, it’s hard to know exactly what the people who put together the program thought about the expectations they might be setting up by putting in quite large type an excerpt from the review of its first performance in the Washington Post, which began ‘Koh..attacked short solos as if she were sawing through a pipe…”
Conceived and written during the covid pandemic lock down, the five movements of the piece represent a move towards healing, which is led by the violin, who Mazzoli describes as ‘a soothsayer, sorcerer, healer, and pied piper-type character.’ The first movement, ‘Procession in a Spiral,’ which is relatively slow, processes in circles, as if getting nowhere. The second is dedicated to St. Vitus, the patron saint of dance, and is, as one might expect, lively and rhythmic. The third, ‘O My Soul,’ is a deconstructed hymn. The fourth, ‘Bone to Bone, Blood to Blood’ referring to a 9th-century incantation for curing broken limbs, is another fast movement. The final movement, ‘Procession Ascending’ is the material of the first movement reorganized and given direction, so that the violinist, as Mazzoli says, ‘leads the orchestra straight into the sky.’ Koh’s playing was resplendent and compelling, and that of the orchestra was equally beautiful. I was not able to locate a moment which sounded as though anybody was sawing through a pipe.
Unlike last summer, when the Proms was somewhat restricted, at least in terms of the size of the audience, and with a number of programs being somewhat shorter and without intermission, this year everything seems to be in full swing again. Certainly the house was packed on August 10 for the concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. This concert sandwiched the new work, Pearl by Matthew Kaner, a BBC commission and first performance, between Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration and Holst’s The Planets. For the stretch of the few days around this concert, this seemed to reflect a programming strategy of hiding, maybe, new pieces among big audience pleasers, not necessarily, at least immediately, related.
Pearl sets extracts of a translation into modern English by British Poet Laureate Simon Armitage of a medieval poem by the anonymous “Gewain Poet,’ which tells the story of a grief-stricken jeweler who revisits the place of the death of a girl, who may be his daughter, who he calls his ‘Pearl.’ The jeweler falls asleep, and in his dream he walks through a magical landscape where he encounters his ‘Pearl’ standing across a river. After discussing his grief and her present setting, ‘where misery and melancholy never come near,’ he attempts to join her, but he awakes, reconciled to her death. Kaner’s work is striking for its faultless word setting (faultlessly and beautifully rendered by the faultless Roderick Williams), and by many instances of imaginative and brilliant orchestral and choral writing. Its effect was somewhat lessened for this listener by its harmonic immobility.
Rather than sandwiching in the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Archora, a BBC Commission which was receiving its first performance on the Prom on August 11, presented by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Eva Ollikainen, between two wildly popular works, the Elgar ‘Cello Concerto and the Sibelius Second Symphony, this concert began with the new piece. Archora, Thorvaldsdottir wrote in her note, ‘centers around the notion of primordial energy and the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm–a world both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere at the same time.’ It does, in fact, have that quality, being at the same time inchoate and constantly engaging, both elusive and compelling. Its instrumental writing was beautiful and impressive and its narrative trajectory, timeless in a good sense, deeply compelling. It was followed by a very beautiful and memorable performance of the Elgar, by ‘cellist Kian Soltani.
On August 13, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra made its Proms debut under its Chief Conductor Marin Alsop. Their program included, along with The Miraculous Mandarin by Bartok, the Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto, with Benjamin Grosvenor, and the Dvorak Seventh Symphony, the first UK performance of Heliosis by Hannah Eisendle. Heliosis is medical term for sunstroke, and Eisendle’s note of the piece seemed to promise some kind of post-apocalyptic sound world (‘…the music depicts a dirty, sultry, sticky-soot kind of summer…rhythmic material explodes, conveying inflamed senses and the wavering between clear wakefulness and exhausted surrender. We hear a glint of dust in the fiery wind—a billow of heat over asphalt runways.’), where “the string represent the sonic topography of the desert landscape,’ and “they often play on and behind the bridge–the rasping sound representing the intensity of the sun.’ There was, in fact, a certain continuous rhythmic complexity and intensity always present, but the material (the notes, for lack of a better word) evoked The Miraculous Mandarin, or The Rite of Spring, or The Dance in the Gym from West Side Story. This listener kept wishing for something closer to what the description seemed to promise.
On August 12, Dave Smith presented a recital of his music at Schott’s Recital Room. The program consisted of the three parts of his Piano Concert No. 9: On the Virtue of Flowers, On the Virtues of Forests, and On the Virtues of Wild Birds, each one about a half hour in length. The music, which was constantly engaging, didn’t necessarily conform to the quickest and easiest expectations. These forest were in a neighborhood not too far from Gershwin, and the wild birds in question were not in the neighborhood of Messiaen’s–no bird songs were damaged in the making of this piece. Each of the three segments was always interesting and always satisfying. The end of On the Virtues of Wild Birds was particularly striking and memorable.