Sequenza21

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.