Articles
Proms 2003A
The BBC Proms | Part 1 | Part 2
Americans initially assume that the BBC Proms concerts are something like the Boston Pops; I think it must be the idea of walking around somehow. Nothing could be further from the case. Founded by Henry Wood many years ago, the concerts now inhabit the Albert Hall in London, where the chairs are cleared out of the central floor and is dedicated to standing room, with the cheapest admission price and the best sound. In fact the Proms is a full-fledged, completely serious series, the biggest European summer music festival, involving every major orchestra and performing organization in Britain and many European and American guests. The range of the programming is extremely wide, and it includes both standard repertory twentieth century works and newer music, particularly but not exclusive British, in abundance. Anybody with a serious interest in music at all, but especially new music, should be sure to check them out if they're in London when the Proms concerts are going on.
Last summer's concerts included a number of works of considerable interest. Judith Weir's The Welcome Arrival of Rain, which was commissioned and first performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, received its first UK performance from The BBC Scottish Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov. The piece reflects, in subtle, almost intangible ways, Weir's recent work with Indian music and storytelling. Bare scale patters alternate with lush and spacious music which becomes increasingly more profuse, leading up to the high energetic climax in which both musics are heard; a brief dreamy coda concludes the work. The composer's vision of the aridity of the Indian earth restored to activity and fertility by the arrival of the annual monsoon inspired the work and suggested, along with a quotation from the Bhagavata Purana, the title. The exemplary performance was followed by an equally compelling reading of the Shostakovitch Tenth Symphony. The concert was preceded earlier in the day by a concert of chamber pieces of Weir's, including Distance and Enchantment, for piano quartet, based on Northern Irish and Scottish folk songs, worked into a beautiful and compelling instrumental texture, Sketches from a Bagpiper's Album, evoking through the combination of clarinet and piano, the sound of the bagpipes and the instrumental and compositional techniques associated with its repertory, and Music for 247 Strings, for violin and piano, an earlier work which, next to those works, has much less profile and less personality, even though it strikingly employs a texture which is a favorite of Weir's, distinctly different contrapuntal lines presented in rhythmic unison. The performances, by students of the Royal Academy of Music, were uniformly splendid. There is, concurrently with the Proms, a weekly series of afternoon chamber concert, and for one of those, a song recital presented by Alice Coote and Julian Drake, the BBC commissioned a new work from Weir, a song cycle entitled The Voice of Desire. The texts, drawn from various source, including Robert Bridges, Thomas Hardy, African folk poetry, and John Keats, view murderous human folly through the eyes of Birds. The very deep seriousness and urgent beauty of the songs were not quite completely fully realized in their first performance. On the following night Volkov and the BBC Scottish Orchestra included in their concert a mesmerizing performance of Ligeti's San Francisco Polyphony.
The Britten Sinfonia and Nicholas Cleobury, in a late-night concert, presented the first performance of John Woolrich's Double Mercury. Although he is about the same age as Weir, Woolrich's music is not so well-know in the US as is hers. It is characterized by a concision of thought and spareness of texture. Double Mercury is described by its composer as being Œa sequence of miniature tone-poems' depicting stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Although full of lively, energetic vivid, skillful made music, the direct correspondence between the music and the stories is not completely clear, although certain episodes, such as the portrayal of the transformation of King Picus into a woodpecker, or the ass's braying of King Midas are pretty clear. The concert included a majesterial performance by Nicholas Daniel of Thea Musgrave's imposing Helios, a concerto for oboe and orchestra. It began with Britten's Young Appollo and concluded with Stravinsky's Orpheus. The performances of everything on the concert was beautiful.
The Lhati Symphony Orchestra from Finland featured Finnish music on its concert of August 18. Neither Allottaret (the first version of the Oceanides) of Sibelius nor the Ninth Symphony of Kalevi Aho, born in 1949, was exactly an expected item. Aho, who teachers at the Sibelius conservatory, writes fairly conservative kind of music, which, at least as represented by this piece, is full of interest and skill. The Symphony is actually a sort of trombone concerto, written for the charismatic Christian Lindberg, whose performance was both powerful and irresistibly infectious. Another Scandinavian group, the Swedish Radio Choir, a few days earlier, also did a late night concert which included brilliant performances of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, Henze's Orpheus Behind the Wire, and their compatriot Ingvar Lidholm's ...a riveder le stelle. The concert was filled out by a definitive performance of Britwistle's Nenia: The Death of Orpheus by Claron McFadden and the Nash Ensemble, conducted by Lionel Friend.
More standard repertory twentieth century works were represented as well. The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier included in their concert brilliant performances of both the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony and Messiane's Les Offrandes oubliées. Andrew Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra along with the BBC Symphony Chorus, The Trinity Boy Choir, The Cantate Youth Choir, tenor Paul Groves, and narrator Nicol Tibbels produced a magnificent performance of Stravinsky's rarely performed Perséphone, before which Dame Felicity Lott, in Poulenc's La voix humaine did what its composer intended the singer in this one character opera about a woman being dumped over the phone in post-war Paris, which is to say she did some singer's equivalent of chewing the scenery. The result was powerful, genuine, and very moving.
The BBC Proms | Part 1 | Part 2
American Music Programing Strategies
In Recent Years more and more American music has appeared on the Proms. This may be a result of Leonard Slatkin's tenure as music director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the broadcast network's flagship London orchestra. In some cases it also seems to have something to do with an effort to draw audiences with more populist music. Certainly ChenYi's percussion concerto performed by Evelyn Glennie, for whom it was written, was a big draw. The work was in many respects a good old-fashioned P. T. Barnum virtuoso concerto, in this case complete with special lighting effects. Ms. Glennie's performance was powerful, rip-roaring and audience-pleasing, and, in providing a sure-fire vehicle for the show, Ms. Chen was equally calculating and shrewdly skillful. That concert, on August 19, was preceded by a Composer Portrait chamber concert. The works included on that concert, Duo Ye for piano, As In a Dream for soprano, violin, and Œcello, and Qi for flute, Œcello, piano, and percussion, drew, as did the Percussion Concerto, on elements of Chinese Music, but in a more twentieth-century American academic modernist context. The performers, students of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, joined by Ms. Chen, who herself sang in As In a Dream, were excellent.
Mark O'Connor is a fabulous folk fiddle player who has ambitions as a composer, abetted by Sony Records and some equally fabulous players like Yo-Yo Ma and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Exactly who decided that it would be a good idea to commission him to write a piece for the Proms, and exactly why they thought it was a good idea is a mystery. The piece he produced, his Sixth Violin concerto, is troubling on a number of levels. It's not a good idea to hold people responsible for what other people's praise for them, but one could easily be incredulous only on reading the claim by Daniel Buckley for O'Connor's Double concerto for two violins and orchestra, premiered by the Chicago Symphony that "At times the harmonic fabric achieves an ambiguity and density to rival Schoenberg or Webern, yet it organically transforms back to a more tonal calm, while managing to make both orchestra and soloists swing." Hard to tell not having heard the piece, but I somehow doubt it--both the ambiguity and density part and the swinging part. But who knows? The proof is in the pudding.
The proof of this particular pudding, though, was a trying experience. "Inspired" by Frank Llloyd Wright's Auldbrass Plantation in South Carolina, which features hexagon buildings, the pieces is largely in 6/8 and deals in six bar phrases. The result was a kind of blandly diatonic rocking music, unarticulated by clear phrasing and endlessly noodle-y. The solo part was not given any particular profile in contrast to the orchestra (either texturally or, since the orchestra was all strings, tambrally.), so it certainly did not have the effect of being any kind of showy display piece for Mr. O'Connor's considerable abilities. The third movement features two fugues in six parts separated by an improvised cadenza, the second combining all the tunes from the piece. Or at least that's what we were told (this time in program notes by O'Connor). One generally only tells about himself when writing about something he can't stand, so I'll try to limit further comments on this piece, except to say about the fugues: One of the first problems one encounters when trying to write contrapuntal music is the difficulty of keeping it from turning into a some sort of chorale, of keeping the parts independent enough to be perceived as vitally separate contrapuntal parts. Not only did Mr. O'Connor not conquer this particularly problem, but he seemed not to have been aware of it at all, in fact it was hard to tell from hearing the music that he had ever heard a fugue. Over and over again one encounters music that is allegedly more appealing to a wider public that Schoenberg or Webern or Cage or Babbitt or Carter or...fill in the blank, and what comes out is something blandly inoffensive even by the standards of some composer like Randall Thompson, or for that matter Cecile Chaminade, and usually displaying less technical competence. What is supposed to be appealing about this, and to whom is an open question. Certainly in this case, with this audience, the piece was a soft egg. A very long soft egg at that. The playing, by the Academy of St. Martin's in the Field, let by Kennth Sillito, accompanying Mr. O'Connor was exemplary. On their own they did marvelous performances of Krzysztof Penderecki's Sinfonia from 1990 (seeming radical by comparison to the O'Connor, since it sounded in turn like Shostakovitch and non-classic Stravinsky) and the Bartok Divertimento (the most modern and forward looking--and satisfying musically--of the lot).
Elliott Carter was represented by two big recent pieces, The Clarinet Concerto from 1996, played by Michael Collins and the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Peter Eötvös, and the Boston Concerto, which received its first Euopean performance by Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Both received excellent performances and both were surrounded by equally interesting pieces: the Clarinet Concerto by Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto, Eötvös's Snatches of a Conversation, Detlev Glanert's Secret Room, and Aventures and Nouvelles aventures by Ligeti, the Boston Concerto by Stravinsky's Agon and his orchestrations for Les Sylphides and Knussen's Violin Concerto, which is not as striking or as magical either as his Horn Concerto or as the new Carter work.