Articles
Proms 2003
In fulfillment of a commission from the BBC for a work in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the BBC Symphony Chorus, Mark-Anthony Turnage produced Calmo, an untypically quiet and gentle work for chorus with handbells and, what has become something of a signature instrument for him, desk bells. The text of the work consists of the words ŒDona nobis pacem' and their translations in several languages. It is dedicated to the memory of Turnage's friend Sue Knussen. Calmo's intense eloquence was enhanced by it's brevity, and, both despite and because of it, stood out in a program of music for chorus, harp, and organ by an assortment of older and newer Czech and British Composers, including Janáèek, MacMillan, Host, and Eben, presented by the BBC Symphony Chorus, conducted by Stephen Jackson. The concert ended with the first performance of The Secret Garden for chorus and organ, another BBC Commission, by Judith Bingham. Bingham is the librettist as well as the composer of the work; her text is a meditation that connects biblical quotations from Genesis (about the expulsion from Eden) and the Gospel of St. Matthew (about the Kingdom of Heaven). The choral writing of The Secret Garden is elaborate and not ineffective. The work itself is somewhat prolix, and seems to dispose of the words of its text at an inexorably consistent rate. The most effective and successful part of it for this listener was the organ solo which is the work's fulcrum.
The first UK performance of , Carl Vine's Celebrare celeberrime--a celebration for orchestra, written for the 60th anniversary of the Dayton Philharmonic, figured on the Proms concert of the Australian Youth Orchestra conducted by Lawrence Foster. Cheerful, lively, and brilliantly orchestrated, the work is entirely introductory. Its effectiveness was somewhat diminished by its placement on the program, at the beginning of the second half of the concert, sandwiched between the Brahms First Piano Concerto and the Shostakovich First Symphony.
A greatly expanded London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Robertson, presented a concert consisting of the first UK performance of Bright Sheng's The Song and Dance of Tears and the Messiaen Turangalîla Symphony. The Sheng was originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to mark the anniversary of the debuts of Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma with the orchestra. Ma requested that the work be related to Sheng's travels along the route of the old Silk Road and that it include a pipa soloist. Eventually it was agreed that Sheng would write a quadruple concerto for the Western Œcello and piano and the Chinese pipa, and sheng.
The three movements of the piece, entitled Song, Dance, and Tears, respectively, are pretty much as advertised. In this performances the decision to amplify the pipa (His fears of the pipa's not being able to be heard over an orchestra was the cause of Sheng's initial reluctance to include it in the work), or at least as it was done this time, seemed like a miscalculation, since it in fact most of the time was balanced over the other solo instruments, none of which stood out as clearly against the orchestral mass, which tended to be rather thick. Balances in general could have been better: solos by members of the orchestra early on in the piece were practically inaudible. The Song and Dance of Tears is dramatic, attractive, elegantly wrought, and compelling in much the same way that extremely good music for movies is, and, in the same manner as most movie music, has a fairly consistently low melodic profile, making it all seem a little unspecific. That quality was highlighted by comparison to the Messiaen, which, however robust, rollicking, brawling, silly, and just downright tacky it may be from time to time, left no doubt, even in this rather overly polite and refined performance, about its intention, its earnestness, or its genuineness.
The Silk Road Ensemble, a crossover project of Yo-Yo Ma's, members of which were the soloists in the Sheng work, returned to the Albert Hall two days later on their own, playing music from an array of non-western music cultures. The program, which featured consistently beautiful playing, nonetheless raised questions and doubts about exactly what was going on and what it all might mean. The program note informed us that the Mongolian composer/arranger of the first work and the fabulous singer in that work, who was a compatriot of his both "represent a new generation of urbanised Mongolians...who are as comfortable in one of Ulaanbaatar's many discoteques and Internet cafés as in a ger, the round felt tent of Mongolian herders." After the initial feeling that somebody might be pulling one's leg, one wondered just what to make of all the implications of the statement. A certain vertiginous quality was provided by performances of music of the Roma, featuring a solo by the pipa player in the manner of The Tiger Rag. The program presented transcriptions, arrangements, and original works for ethnic instruments as more or less the same thing, without hinting that what was being performed was not exactly authentic folk music. Little acknowledgment was made of the fact that someone had had to write or arrange the music that was played or of those composers and arranger beyond their names and birth years. This listener found a certain self-congratulatory assumption that the Silk Road Ensemble was making the world a better place for us all to live in not particularly appealing. It may well, be, though that none of these reservations was important in the light of the spectacularly dazzling playing and the consistently infectious music making. Certainly the very large audience seemed to be having one whale of a time.
The Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Ingo Metzmacher brought the first UK performance of the Tenth Symphony of Hans Werner Henze to the Proms. Henze first imagined the music of the symphony to be Œsomething crystalline and clear and English,' conveying the quality of its intended first conductor, Simon Rattle, as Œa modern man in love with the world.' Although each of its four movements has a romantically evocative title, A Storm, A Hymn, A Dance, A Dream, they are arranged in the manner of a classical symphony: a substantial first movement, a slow movement, a scherzo, and a reflective finale. Musically the work also has a highly evocative romantic quality. Henze deploys the enormous orchestra used in the symphony with consummate and magisterial mastery, unfolding at just about every moment of the work beautiful and breathtaking instrumental textures. Like the Sheng piece, however, the symphony has a lack of melodic character and profile which makes its effect more general than specific. The performance of this very difficult work, apart from the slow movement which seemed to be a little hurried and had a certain cursory quality, was assured, understanding, and compelling.