Articles
PROMS 1998
Many, if not most cities, especially in the United States, close down musically more or less for the summer. It's often difficult to find any music at all going on, let alone new music. Not so London, where there's lots going on due to the Proms. In the U.S. if you mention the Proms to people they're likely to assume that it's something like the Boston Pops. Nothing could be further from the case. The Promenade Concerts, run by the BBC, mainly at the Albert Hall is a massive festival of around seventy concerts (last summer 72) consisting of an almost unimaginable variety of music, performed by every major orchestra and opera company in Britain and any number of guest ensembles as well. There are always a number of works commissioned for the concerts, but they are not by any means all of the new music one can encounter there. There's plenty to keep a new music tourist interested. I was around London for three weeks in August. There had been performances of works by Henze, Dominic Muldowney, Lutoslawski, Schnittke, John Pickard, Shelton E. Kilby III, and John Adams, as well as Ives, Britten, Shostakovitch, Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, and others earlier, and I did not hear performances of works of Tan Dun, more Schnittke, Colin Matthews, Gerhard, Ned Rorem, David Horne, Detlev Glanert, Geoffrey Burgon, Kurtag, Nicholas Maw, James Dillon, and Mark Anthony Turnage which were performed while I was around. But what follows is a report of what I did hear.
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies conducted the London Premier of his Sixth Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic on August 6. The Symphony is in three movements, the first two being intimately related. Davies referred to the second as a double of the first, also describing the first as a sonata movement masquerading as a scherzo, while the second is a scherzo masquerading as a sonata movement. Both begin with slow introductions. The third movement is slow and contemplative and is a continuous unfolding of its initial idea, leading to the revelation of the material of the introduction of the first movement. Every aspect of the Symphony is powerful and masterly. The remainder of the program was works of Nielsen ("Helios" Overture) and Sibelius (Lemminkainen's Return, and the Violin Concerto, with Tasmin Little ), all of it brilliantly performed.
August 11 was a Stravinsky day, featuring three concerts of his music. The most memorable part of the two concerts I heard was a performance of The Flood conducted by Oliver Knussen. It's a toss up whether The Flood or Threni is the most maligned piece by Stravinsky. I happen to believe that neither of them deserves the reputation they have, and that they're both pretty wonderful. I would think that anybody thinking otherwise about The Flood would only have to hear a performance as good as this one. The only thing which kept this one from being a complete revelation was that there's been a recording of it by Knussen, with mostly the same people involved in this performance, on DGG for about a year. The live performance was on the same level as the recorded one, which is to say splendid and overwhelming. This concert also had on it The Fairy's Kiss and Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Verona ad CD annum, along with Stravinsky's completion of Three Sacred Pieces by Gesualdo. None of these pieces, although excellently played, had any of the impact of The Flood, but then none of them is on the same level or, for that matter, as important as The Flood. The earlier concert of the day, which I heard, was a rather spiffy staged performance of L'histoire du Soldat, performed by members of the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Daniel Harding, with Simon Russell Beale as narrator. The third concert, which I didn't hear, contained the Cantata, the Mass, and the Concerto for Piano and Winds.
The concert by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen seemed to me to be about the best concert I'd ever heard. The program consisted of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Debussy Nocturnes, Oliver Knussen's Horn Concerto, The Mozart Horn Concerto, K.447, and the Sibelius Seventh Symphony. Even if the playing of the Philhamonia hadn't been nearly as extraordinary as it was, this concert would have been an occasion, since it was the last London performance of Barry Tuckwell, the soloist, whose playing seemed completely inspired in the Knussen and less so in the Mozart. The Knussen concerto itself is really beautiful. Full of echos of German Romantic music, and evocations of some sort of woodsy outdoors, it seems to inhabit a kind of fairy tale world like that of Maurice Sendak's Outside Overthere. It is certainly Knussen's best piece.
The next day saw the first performance of John Woolrich's Oboe Concerto. This is an extraordinarily interesting piece, in the best sense of the word. It consists of music in great blocks for a big orchestra, all seemingly static, alternating music the for oboe and its accompanying entourage of oboes and soprano saxophone. The succeeding blocks accrue material and gradually reveal connections over the course of the piece. The oboe music eventually connects to the tutti via the trumpet. There is a huge amount of percussion. The music is always attractive and the orchestration is always wonderful, and the whole thing is compelling and satisfying and, well, interesting, for it's entire twenty minutes. It's just a first rate piece. The soloist was Nicholas Daniel. The rest of the concert, which was by the BBC Symphony, conducted by Matthias Barnert offered Vaughan Williams (the Tallis Fantasia), Bach- Stokowski (Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor), and the Schoenberg Orchestration of the Brahms G minor Piano Quartet. The playing of the BBC Orchestra was really fine; since they were also the Orchestra for the Stravinsky day, they presumably had two days to prepare this concert. The standards of orchestra playing in London are very high--higher than in the US, or at least Boston and New York, even when the playing isn't on the level that the Philharmonia achieved.
A concert by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble with Peter Donohoe on August 22, late at night, contained a wonderful performance of Oiseaux exotiques of Messiaen, which is a pretty wonderful piece, and what seemed to be a quite good performance of Kevin Volans's Piano Concerto, which is not so wonderful. Daniel Harding conducted. There were also unconducted performances of the Stravinky Octet and the Mozart C minor Serenade, K. 388.