circleImagine the difference an election could make. BBC Proms This has been a year of hope and relief – with the culture wars over and the licence fee declared safe, people’s hearts must be lifted. BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus The first night, BBC SingersAfter coming under threat of dissolution last year, the ensemble that should have been most celebrated has become a symbol of the previous administration’s bellicose hostility towards the British arts.
When Bruckner arranged Psalm 150, he shouted “Hallelujah!” Prom 1 Conductor Elim Chan was overwhelmed by the power of the music and turned up the volume to maximum, but this was only the beginning of the evening’s big surprise. Ben Nobutof Hallelujah Sim, It’s a highly entertaining “step-by-step tutorial” for choir and orchestra, structured like a video game, and ironically premiered on the same day that Microsoft systems crashed worldwide.
A synthetic voice directs the performers to work through four levels of Hallelujah, each with its own challenges (singing individual parts, combining, singing fast, singing slow, randomizing syllables, singing backwards) while the orchestra plays a crazy, cartoonish accompaniment. Nobut (born 1996) believes we live in an internet-saturated age, and here he takes traditional musical elements and gives them a 21st-century digital sheen, making them glorious, highly clever, and entertaining. Rehearsing must have been a nightmare, so thanks go to chorus master Neil Ferris and Chan for putting it all together. The audience loved it, which isn’t always the case with new Proms material.
Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason (who was lobbying Parliament last week for improved music education in schools) became an instant favourite at the Prommers with her impressive solo debut in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 last year. This year, as a champion of women composers, she performed Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, which she first recorded with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in 2019. Critics praised her bold, assertive playing at the time, a quality that was reproduced last week. Clara Wieck was just 13 when she began composing this piece, and was clearly already a skilled pianist. Kanneh-Mason brought real dignity to this display of adolescent fireworks, but perhaps the highlight was her beautifully judged duet with principal cellist Louisa Tuck in the graceful central movement.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a piece we all know, but under Chang’s direction it took on new life, revealing details, accentuating melodies and clearly defined rhythms. There is a constant sense of growing excitement throughout the work, but here it hurtles towards the final Allegro with dramatic intent. It was a stirring end to a memorable evening.
Manchester Jewel Orchestra, Harereached a milestone last week when Music Director Mark Elder conducted his final prom after 25 years at the helm.Prom 4As with the farewell concert in Manchester, Elder was keen to have all the Halle’s elements part of this Prom – the orchestra, the adult choir, the youth choir and an excellent children’s choir – which created an impressive choral wall with James MacMillan’s arrangements of Dryden’s poems. Timotheus, Bacchus, CeciliaBut it has the unintended consequence of being much more comfortable for younger voices than for older sopranos, who often struggle with MacMillan’s demanding top lines.The work has received positive reviews, but it is a strange and uneven production, with Dryden’s portrayal of the transformative power of music remaining the most compelling.
Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 was the perfect choice to showcase the wealth of talent present in each section of the orchestra that Elder has built up over the past 25 years. The strings are smooth, the brass sharp, the woodwinds agile. The long journey from funeral darkness to uncertain triumphant light is mesmerizing, and the famous Adagietto for harp and strings, a love song to Mahler’s future wife Alma Schindler, is beautifully judged, without once slipping into sentimentality, which Elder abhorred, as he told the audience in his farewell address. His focus was on the players, the Proms (he attended them as a teenager) and the future of live music, “something we all need, perhaps more than ever before.” And so rightly so.
Schindler’s name came up again at the Prom, a sparsely attended but interesting reenactment of a 1905 concert in Vienna, in which brothers-in-law Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky performed Schoenberg’s ” Pelléas and Melisande And Zemlinsky’s mermaid (Prom 5). The doleful Zemlinsky chose Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Little Mermaid, in which he watches his beloved marry another, because it echoed his own experience of his beloved Alma marrying Mahler. Conductor Ryan Bancroft and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales delighted with Zemlinsky’s emotive music, which shone with supernatural mysticism and sometimes bordered on kitsch.
But Zemlinsky’s music, however brilliant and accessible, does not share the depth and complexity of Schoenberg’s rich colours. PellYs“Schoenberg’s ‘Pelle des le le pièces’ shone under Bancroft’s assured conducting. Schoenberg convened a huge orchestra (nine horns, full brass, 16 woodwinds, two harps and two timpani) and used these forces to tell the tale of a love triangle that inevitably ends in tragedy. The sonorous, restless score swells and twists as it depicts the plot of Maeterlinck’s dreamlike play, charting the ecstatic passion of Pelléas and Mélisande and the fierce jealousy of the Prince, who cannot bear to lose her. This enthralling tale promises to be a highlight of the season, but it’s only the first week.
Star rating (5 stars)
Prom 1 ★★★★★
Prom 4 ★★★★
Prom 5 ★★★★★
