Articles
Proms 2001
In a time when new music is being marginalised with a speed which far outstrips the rate of global warming, it is both gratifying and reassuring that the BBC Proms maintain a commitment to including a considerable amount of music of the 20th and 21st century on the programs of what is the largest music festival in the world. Even more cheering is that the inclusion of this music turns out not to be invariably box office poison. That the range of styles is wider than in the heyday of Sir William Glock, and less heavily weighted towards the modernistic is both not necessarily a bad thing and probably inevitable, given the temper of the times. One can be grateful that music by such composers as Xenakis, Boulez, Ligeti, Birtwistle, and Messiaen is there at all, along with music of a more easy-listening type.
The Cosmo girl seems to spend a good deal of time trying to determine what men want, just as what women want is supposed to be one of the major mysteries of the life of men. It struck me as I was thinking about Tobias Picker's ŒCello Concerto, which was performed by Paul Watkins and the BBC Symphony, conducted by David Robertson, that it was the result of a good deal of worrying and calculation about what an audience would want, what performers would want, and what a presenter would want. The answer provided by the piece seems to be that an audience wants a piece that doesn't worry or bother them too much; performers want something that isn't too long, isn't too complicated, isn't hard to count, and consequently can be put together quickly and easily. Presenters want all those things, plus a composer of a certainly notoriety, so they can put the piece on without too much expense, be pretty sure that it won't be too difficult or offensive for an audience, and be salable to the world as, at the very least, something like a masterpiece. Possibly because of all these calculations and caution about what people would want it to be the Picker also attains a level of inoffensiveness, which is to say blandness, which makes pieces by Copland, Thomson, or Piston--even a composer like Randall Thompson--seem daring and radical. Writing a Œcello concerto does bring a composer face to face with a major technical problem, that of making sure that the solo instrument can be heard. Picker's answer to that question is to severely limit the activity of the orchestral textures and to accompany the Œcello, which mostly plays tunes, mostly with blocky chords. This is not the tactic taken by Dvorak, Tschaikovsky, or Elgar.
The Picker concerto shared the program on August 12 with vivid, brilliant, and lively performances of Pierre Boulez's vivid and brilliant orchestrations, or more precisely recompositions for orchestra, of his earliest published piano compositions, Notations. Five of the original twelve pieces have appeared so far, and all of these were performed, VII receiving its first UK performance. Also included were performances of Janacek's Sinfonia, notable for its verve and color, and Ives's Three Places in New England, whose beauty, understanding, and clarity were striking and memorable.
Beauty, understanding, and clarity were also the hallmarks of the performance of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto by Ernst Kovacic and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Joseph Swensen a little over a week later. That concert also included a novelty, the first UK performances of Notturno by Schoenberg, written in 1896. The piece was lovely, and bore practically no finger prints of its composer's eventual personality.
Esa-Pekaka Salonen appeared twice at the Proms, on August 15 as a composer and two days later as a conductor. His Foreign Bodies, performed by The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, proved to be engaging and skillful, both in its construction and its orchestration. However, the strongest impression from that concert, for this listener anyway, was its second half, the back to back performances of the sixth and seventh Symphonies of Sibelius. Direct and immediate comparison made very evident the fact that the treatment and use of tempo in the pieces are diametrically opposed and are achieved by using exactly the same methods. The performances of all three of the pieces, as well as the remaining work, Seven Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Mahler, were majesterial and lovely. Salonen's appearance as a conductor, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, featured a rapt and compelling performance of Ligeti's Requiem, which made the brilliant musicalness and inescapable individual and personal character of the music manifest. The concert also included wonderful performances of The Stravinsky Violin Concerto, with Thomas Zehetmair, and the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. As a pendant to the orchestral concert, the Proms Chamber Music on August 20 featured performances of five of the astounding etudes for piano by Ligeti, which along with works of Chopin and Debussy, received very fine performances by Pierre-Laurent Almard, a champion of Ligeti's music.
Yuri Bashmet appeared on August 13 with his Moscow soloists with brilliantly polished performances of works of Britten (Two Portraits and Lachrymae), Hindemith (Trauermusick),
and Shostakovitch. The novelty of the evening was the Shotakovitch, which was an arrangement as a viola concerto of the 13th String Quartet. The expert arrangement by Alexander Tchaikovsky was a bit of a disappointment, despite the strongly persuasive performance by performers whose command of their instruments and whose understanding of the music were beyond any possible reproach. The problem was the things which require effort and struggle when played by four players become much less demanding, both physically and intellectually, when distributed among nineteen of them. It gave a considerable buffer zone to what is a harrowing work.
A late night Prom on August 23 by the BBC Orchestra and the BBC Big Band, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, was devoted to American piece in a Jazz vein. Ellington's Harlem and Gershwin's Lullaby both, despite very appealing moments, seem to this listener to be less than completely satisfying. Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs, on the other hand, is one of his most successful works. All of them received impeccable performances. The concert ended with Michel Comilo's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, for which the composer joined the assembled forces as soloist. Slatkin, in fairly extensive comments before the performance, and, I suppose in the performance, made his admiration and enjoyment of the piece clear. What he saw in it is beyond me. It seemed to me to be commonplace and tiresome.
August 20 held another late night Prom by Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta and London Sinfonietta Chorus, which contained much wonderful music, wonderfully played. Continuing a survey of those works on the cusp of Stravinsky's transformation into a twelve-tone composer, Knussen led beautiful performances of Canticum Sacrum and the Von Himmel Hoch Variations. These were followed by a compelling and engaging performance of the very lovely and rigorous and captivating Polla ta dina by Xenakis. Kenneth Hesketh's The Circling Canopy was out of its league in this company, despite all the help given by a strong performance. Hans Wener Henze's beguiling First Symphony, written when he was 21, was not.
Yet another late night Prom on August 29 featured the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Nicholas Cleobury in two works of Constant Lambert, along with a small work by Gerald Finzi and one of Britten's masterpieces, his Nocturne for tenor and chamber orchestra. Prize Fight by Lambert, written when he was 22, the subject suggested by his teacher Vaughan Williams, who had not long before than written an opera with a boxing match in it, was the work of a brilliantly talented and promising student. The main impression conveyed by the performance of his Piano Concerto, restored by Easterbrook and Shipley, despite a performance which was as good as one could wish for, was that there were very good reasons for Lambert's abandoning the work before its completion.
Finzi's Farewell to Arms, a small recitative and aria, is a strikingly lovely piece which has persisted strongly in my memory, despite a uninvolved and off hand performance by Ian Bostridge. Perhaps he can be forgiven for not taking much trouble with this small piece, but his same attitude toward the Britten is hard to forgive. Aside from the coolness of the performance, the application of exactly the same sound (which I suppose could be accurately described as "beautiful") indiscriminately to each of the very different emotional situations of the eight songs which comprise the work, became intensely irritating. The performance was completely unworthy of the great piece it pretended to be giving us.
Earlier that night there was a concert by Pierre Boulez and the BBC Symphony Orchestra which was undoubtedly the highlight of the summer's listening. Performances of Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Film Scene and Boulez's Le visage nuptial which were merely spectacular, were followed by an overwhelmingly magnificent performance of Duke Bluebeard's Castle by Bartok. The intensely concentrated, dramatic, and beautiful singing of Michelle DeYoung and expecially of Laszlo Polgar, were equaled by breathtakingly vivid and eloquent playing by the orchestra, full of wild drama and dazzling instrumental color.