In the Cold Light of Day . . .

I have, as readers will have gathered by now, become increasingly disillusioned—sometime disturbed—over the years by some of the classical music criticism in the national press. It is becoming harder and harder sometimes to understand what point of view some critics are writing from.

As readers will also have gathered, I've temporarily had to suspend my Proms listening, thanks to a rotten cold, and therefore did not hear the Mahler 2 where at least one critic's response appears so utterly out of sync with others it's difficult to interpret or assign the reasons for it.

The same seems to be true of Prom 53, the Budapest's and Ivan Fischer's Brahms, which I did attend, though stressfully sucking throat lozenges by the handful; with some mildly dizzying side-effects by the time the Missa Solemnis ended and I was waiting for the bus at midnight that night.

I had intended to write up both until my cold intervened, but with several live attendances to go, I may have to save reflections on them for the audiobritain site later rather than this more chronological blog.

However, Fischer's Brahms was beautifully played. Understated, perhaps, if you want Brahms very Viennese with plenty of whipped cream and Torte; this was Brahms from the other bank of the river. Cooler, gentler, reflective. And, which I think goes to what I feel is a total misunderstanding of that night on the part of some reviewers, a concert designed as a whole.

Both symphonies were played not as stand-alone pieces, especially not as virtuoso pieces,but as reflections, even continuations, of each other. This was not so much a concert of Brahms' Third followed after a relaxing Stein or two by the Fourth in which the drinkers had time to forget or tuck away, indexed at the back of their minds along with 'great performances Nos 1-11, what they'd just heard. This was 'Symphonic Brahms, Parts Three and Four'; a concert entire, to be considered and reflected upon.

That should not, by now, be an unfamilar situation at a Prom. It's been, over the years, what so many performances have been about: evolving interpretations, sidelong glances, slightly unexpected variations and insights. It is an ephemeral thing, a concert; not a monument. That is what Fischer and the Budapest were giving us in Prom 53. Not 'Great Performance No 43 to be Compared Forever with No 14'.

I was a bit taken aback, when I sneaked out of Door 8 down the ramp for my interval ciggie—yes, I know, I shouldn't still be smoking with a cold, should I?—to find an emergency ambulance outside, doors open, ramp down and blue lights flashing. We hadn't noticed any disturbance from anyone being taken ill in the hall.

Apparently, it was Fischer himself who had become ill at the interval—did the evil cold gremlin lurking somewhere in the Albert Hall  that got me have anything to do with it?—and the second half was delayed (without explanation apart from 'unexpected circumstances') for ten or fifteen minutes. That probably explains the slightly shaky beginning of the Fourth. He had obviously recovered by the end of the concert, for we had a very unusual encore, Brahms' Abendständchen. Unusual, because it was sung, to everyone's surprise, by the entire orchestra.

This is the first time, to my recollection, I've ever seen a whole symphony orchestra transform itself into an instant choral society. They might not be the Monteverdi Choir we heard later that night, or the BBC chorus in terms of technique or volume, but they sang beautifully.

And I'd thought it a neat trick when the percussion section of the Budapest left their drum kits behind and turned themselves into human percussion at their last late-night Prom. What on earth are they going to surprise us with next time? A short ballet, perhaps?

Fischer, I think, is, deservedly, a Prommers' favourite; and so, for me anyway, is his band. They made up for a Czech Phil that I'd earlier been anticipating and found unexpectedly disappointing.

I am hoping my erstwhile colleague can be persuaded to write up Prom 53, while I concentrate on my lemon-squeezing and cough-suppression self-hypnosis techniques to be ready for at least Proms 62 and 64.

Prom 50: Inspiration versus Application

I was wondering whether to write anything about Prom 50. Firstly, because I live in the middle of Carnival where the sound stages get so loud it's near-impossible to concentrate on anything but strategems and devices to stop the windows rattling and the doors vibrating.

But secondly, having been to the RAH listening to the Dvorak Cello Concerto last night, for fear I would be accused of being curmudgeonly and not liking anything this season.

Especially of being too sceptical of the true value of young 'stars'. In an interview (one of the current series where the BBC seems to be furiously plugging 'new stars—in the absence of real ones?) Alisa Weilerstein said:

"It's arguably the best-written major work for cello, it's completely epic and symphonic in scope. It has every range of emotion you could ask for," she says. "It's like reading a really great novel and having every character incredibly developed."

And she says, from the point of view of the performer, it's a piece that sits well on the instrument. "It slides beautifully in the hands, even though it's quite challenging and very virtuosic. But most importantly I think it's just an incredibly touching, moving work."

All that is certainly true. But knowing that is one thing, transmitting it to an audience is another, and it 'read' more like one of those sc-fi novels where you get several pages of brief bios of the characters in alphabetical order so you can get some idea of them that you couldn't while you were actually reading it.

Technically (I do seem to say this a lot) Weilerstein's playing was extremely capable; but I still only got a list of characters and not much depth of characterisation; nor did I get much sense of emotion. I want more from a musical performance (especially of this Dvorak of all things) than to admire from afar technical and deliberated aspects of bowing and fingering that would have delighted a TV director had the cameras been there.

I weary rather of being increasingly asked to admire an 'interpretation' for its own sake, regardless of its musical propriety, absolute validity, or otherwise. This did nothing much to increase (or diminish!) my appreciation of the Concerto; and I fear—actually, I know—by the end of tomorrow I will have entirely forgotten it.

Soloist and orchestra did not really seem to gel, which is odd, since they collaborated in a recording. I wondered whether there had been sufficient rehearsal or discussion before Prom 50, or had Weilerstein been relying on repeating a studio performance live? That's something that doesn't—can't—work in a venue like the Royal Albert Hall.

Her encore (a Bach Sarabande) too, lacked emotional colour and variety of tone; it was, frankly, somewhat drawn out and uninspiring. I spent most of it playing alternatives in my head, imagining how some other cellist would have played it.

The Janacek House of the Dead overture was nice and lively, though also in some respects a bit ruahed and untidy. The Beethoven Seventh was played—relatively—'safe' but with an interesting variation. Belohlavek had placed the double basses at the back just below where the choir sits, high above the rest of the orchestra. It made their parts in the Beethoven Seventh stand out in a way you don't normally hear except in early-instrument performances, which is presumably why he did it.

Behlolavek had a bit of an unhappy history with the Czech Phil. A couple of years ago, he said in an interview:

"In purely professional terms, the orchestra has always delivered high-quality performances, yet many a time it did not radiate a real and ardent enthusiasm for artistic creation. Ardour, the spark in performance and forcibility of expression are qualities that cannot be feigned, they must appear as an additional product, as a result of an intellectual and emotional unification and consonance within the ensemble. Only then do they really impress the audience."

He seemed a little anxious about his future relations with the orchestra; and I wondered last night whether there are signs of strain. The potentiality for that "intellectual and emotional unification and consonance" was there, but given his history with BBCSO I had expected it to be stronger last night.

Prom 48: Diamond Geysers

It's one of the Proms programmers' old tricks: offer the audience a good ol' classic they can all air-conduct to, but sneak in a couple of new pieces that would otherwise leave the Albert Hall as empty as . . .Iceland outside Reykyavik?

The attraction for Prom 48 was Beethoven's Fifth; the deterrents were Haukur Tomasson's Magma and Leifs' Geysir. Somewhere in between, which could have been either challenging or lollipop=-flavoured was Schumann's A minor piano concerto.

Probably, the less said about Magma the better. A series of eruptions it was Ligeti-in-a-china-shop, scalded a bit on the soles of the feet and hopping around smashing into the crockery. For a good ten minutes more than its invention could really sustain.

The other new piece was very different. I had been persuaded to go to this Prom by my friend and sometime colleague here, who had heard some of Leifs' work on Radio 3 and said it sounded very interesting. And so it was: energetic, vivid, colourful and coherent. And, possibly, leaving some of the gallery-goers possibly unable to hear the quieter beginning of the Beethoven 5 that followed, unless the BBC offered them free earplugs.

The gallery in the RAH has become, over the years something of an extension of the stage down below. And sonically a very effective one that seems to have become increasingly exploited as its possibilities (an unforeseen side-effect of the acoustic re-arrangement of the 'flying saucers' some years back, I suspect) have dawned.

On my way back up to the Circle after  my interval cigarette, I was in the lift with two sound technicians clutching battery packs, one of whom appeared to be explaining something to the other about miking the 'timps on the left'. Seated again, noting two sets of timps in the orchestra, I scanned the left-hand set curious to see some novel microphone set up., but spotted nothing unusual. It was only when two sets of timps burst into glorious thundering action at each end of the gallery I realised just why they had been going up in the lift instead of down. Incredibly dramatic; and very, very loud.

I'm not immune, of course, and nor are a lot of prommers, to the slightly embarrassing syndrome Beecham once took us all to task for when he said the English don't really like music, they just like the noise it makes. But there is 'good' noise' and just 'noise', and that particular noise was very good, musically speaking. I had not come across Leifs before, but for all that Geysir was fairly obviously programmatic and descriptive he is a composer to be searched out.

I have, over the years, whether rightly or wrongly, become increasingly impatient with young (or 'new') pianists. Biss showed, as these relative newcomers so often do, considerable technical expertise and spirit; but a concerto of any kind is not really a two-sided display of virtuosity between opposing forces, the soloist on the one side and the orchestra on the other as this was. There's an illuminating paragraph in Biss's own biographical page:

"Mr. Biss’ enthusiasm manifested itself from the very beginning of his studies, far exceeding his six year-old physical and intellectual capacities. This enthusiasm (or, if you take the word of Mr. Biss’s friends and associates, “obsessiveness” and “neurosis”) remains today. . ."

Indeed it does, or at least did on Friday night. But I do not really want to hear obsessive neuroticism in Schuman's piano concerto Op 54.

Volkov played a pretty straight Beethoven's Fifth, which wasn't going to strain the audience's concentration or test their patience, yet was full of discreet instrumental textures—albeit occasionally a little cloudy or maybe under-emphatic, that made me almost wish the Icelanders had been playing 'authentic' instruments. They played this not quite small-scale, but avoided very neatly any symptom of the bombastic.

The Iceland Symphony Orchestra is very good indeed, with lovely woodwind textures. Oh, yes: and timpanists who moonlight as Icelandic strongmen who could no doubt smother a geyser with their bare hands?

Prom 47 Britten's War Requiem: More Jaw-Jaw than War War?

Can one be a 'traditionalist' about performances of Britten's War Requiem? There are, in my head, two performances: one, obviously, the Britten-conducted Decca recording; the other a stunning and outstanding performance at the Proms conducted by Kurt Masur*, which, like last night's, also ended with a long silence before the audience could bring itself to applaud.

There was a serious difference between then and now. The last baritone solo was sung then from the gallery, a distant, haunting, melancholic, gentle, emotional piece that brought unbidden tears to many eyes. Followed by several seconds of silence from the audience as they absorbed the implications of the whole before they applauded. Masur, I remember, with a diffidence no-one expected, held up the score to the audience: it was not, he was saying, their performance that had created that reaction, but the work. though it could hardly have happened without them, of course.

Last night, Andris Nelsons beat Gergiev's record for holding off the audience's applause. But it was contrived. His intention, obviously, was to impose a one-minute silence upon the whole of the Albert Hall; the audience respected it; but whether for the whole sixty seconds I can't be sure.  I'm not entirely sure that it should have been done.

What exactly were we supposed to be observing a minute's silence for? To remind us of November 11th? To reflect upon the dead of the first world war? to reflect on the horrors of war? If any of that comes out of the music, then that is something that should, can, only be spontaneous. At least no-one offered any of the soloists a bouquet of poppies.

This was an unusual performance of the War Requiem. And, with its other contrivances. It began with unusually retrained tempi; and some of the great climaxes, like the blaring brass of 'Rex tremendae' relatively constricted. The real great thundering orchestral climax was left to the Albert Hall organ; rather like a giant trampling over what had gone before.

Nelsons treated this primarily as a choral requiem mass for the dead, deploying enormous choral forces. But  that is to give both the bitter pathos of involvement in war that are in the words of the poems and the scoring that represents such a harsh contrast between the mass in memory of the dead, which celebrates in a sense the inevitability of a death in the past and the words of the dead and dying which present to all our consciences the fear of the inevitability of death in wars in the future.

That, it seems to me, is the essence of Brittten's War Requiem, and why he gave it that title. It is not, as Nelsons seemed to think, a requiem like one of Verdi or Barlioz. It is also musically intensely dramatic: it is not hard to hear, even subconsciously, the rattle of machine guns, the boom of artillery, in the percussion: and the contradictory moments of peace, quiet and that sometimes did (and do) intersperse the greater noises and violence of armed conflicts.

There is great drama there. Not only in the physicality of the noise, but the psychology of the poetry and the poets the soloists represent. The War Requiem, in some ways, is as operatically fierce and baits the emotions just as much as Billy Budd or Peter Grimes.

That, though, in the over-emphasis on the choral requiem, was missing last night. There is great pathos in the poetry—and therefore a necessity on the part of the audience to be able to reflect on it as it is sung—which it overwhelmed. It was—not wanting to be tarred with some kind of rebarbative traditionalist brush where only the composer's vision is the only one—certainly a different interpretation; I'll accept that. But, despite the glorious singing (the children's choir up in the gallerywas particularly remarkable) as I began to reflect afterwards, and do again now, it was too contrived to stand up in the end as anything other than a curious experiment.

*Rather oddly, this seems to have been more or less forgotten as far as the internet is concerned (perhaps partly because of the way the Beeb has managed to pretty well monopolise Google with this season) but it was, according to last night's programme, in the 1990 season with the RPO. (We had thought it was '89, the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War.) We both thought after that—and to me, the events of this year again reinforce the feeling—perhaps the War Requiem ought to be as regular a part of the Proms season as Beethoven's ninth.

iPlayer

If you want to read a review which starts from an entirely opposite position, I recommend Classical Iconoclast's.  I can't say I disagree about, for want of a better term, the 'musicality' of the performance. In fact, it did absorb me in that respect very effectively at the RAH. I cannot deny it was cleverly musically involving. But reflection still tells me that however enterprising it was I still cannot really feel it respected the intentions or the real purpose, or the raw emotions of Britten's score.

(I shall be at the 'volcano' Prom tonight; and others over the Bank Holiday. Whether I shal be abler to post anything will be entorely dependent on Notting Hill Carnival. I live in the middle of it, and the noise level tends to make it near impossible to concentrate on anything else . . .That said, I'm looking forward to being woken on Sunday and Monday mornings by traditional Blues as I am every year. . .)

Apologies; temporarily laid low again after trip to Glyndebourne for Mozart's 'Dodgy Gardener'—who actually looked as though she'd never been near so much as a daisy—which proved something of a strain on the wrecked Prommer spine.

Great fun, btw, and some beautiful singing, for all several reviews were decidedly grudging. And although the story is pretty silly, if you like Handel operas (or if you've ever read Richardson's Pamela) it wasn't that incomprehensibly ridiculous. . .

(Was complimented on the way my 'biker gloves' went with my evening dress. Not intended as a a fashion statement: they're the fingerless black leather gloves I wear to protect my hands pushing my wheelchair about. I just forgot to take them off when I got to my seat. Thinking now though  of starting a Hell's Wheelchair Opera Chapter. Will see if the local tattoo parlour will do me a tattoo of Danielle de Niese.)

Prom 29: Size Matters . . .

It's big.  Very big. It's hard not to feel awe looking at it, even when you know you shouldn't. you wish you had one like it. And it's sometimes subject to abuse. Most notably—and on a Sunday, too1— two years ago by the Mohican haired Cameron Carpenter, playing Bach as though it was Meatloaf's lead instrument.

But it produces amazing climaxes, now no-one's frightened to handle it as they used to be. And there's nothing quite like an opportunity to show off its full throbbing grandeur than St Saens' 'Organ' Symphony.

Thus it was in Prom 29. A pity, then, that there is more to Saint-Saens Symphony No 3 than the organ. It is, after all, called a 'symphony', not a sonata for  organ with orchestral accompaniment. A pity, too, that Noseda couldn;t—as so often happens with recordings of the piece—match the power of the organ with something approaching equal power from the orchestra.

Or give us anything like enough of the textural and tonal fancifulness that Saint-Saens scored that makes Symphony No 3 in the right hands (and they're few) more than a bit of trivia with a single theme to be lifted for cartoons. It wasn't as it should, or could, have been,

What it can be, is admirably expressed in a advocatory piece by Tom Service in the Guardian, which says pretty much what I would have liked to, so I shall happily leave it to him. He writes, at the end:

"I have the image, at the end of the symphony, of the concert hall being miraculously lifted off the ground and held aloft by the combined efforts of all those pipes and all that air; all that counterpoint and all that time-stretching speeding up and slowing down; all that scraping and blowing, and all those keyboards. The whole work is a magnificent and fantastical symphonic machine that's an apotheosis of the orchestral technology of the late 19th century. In other words: the Organ Symphony is the definitive steampunk symphony"

Of all the places the Saint-Saens should have flown high into the roof to burst into the evening sky, it should have been the Albert Hall. It cries out for it. But it didn't happen; Nosada's conducting was too often leaden, note-bound, as though the score was a library edition only worth dusting off for the sake of the organ.

Perhaps its sheer size loomed over Nosada; perhaps it intimidated him instead of exciting him, for all its (relatively) new-found fun lighting which every Prom now shows it off as a piece of Victorian steampunk engineering.

Oh, but that organ! Apparently, at rehearsal, at every entry, the orchestra cheered. I'm not sure they should have been cheering it on like a rugby crowd; more like rugby forwards gearing themselves up for a scrum. But perhaps they were intimidated by its size, too. It was wonderful.

It's come into its glory days again, after all those dismal years when either  no-one dared play it or dared not risk more than a few dozen bars on it; or, sometimes, played it as though it was a mouse-chewed old church harmonium. And you wondered if it was just boasting.

Yes, size does matter . . .

Late Night Prom Lights Out: Prom 25

Photo: Gas lamp style street light in London at dusk.
© the author

Last night's 'late night Prom' (which wasn't that late, not ending at bedtime even for a ten year old) was strange. Not in the music, for Taverner's Ikon of Light was haunting and numinous in just the way candles gradually and slowly change a Greek Orthodox service from beginning in shadowy darkness to culminating in blazing light.

The greater light, in Prom 25, being cast by Taverner's Requiem Fragments, bursting over the Albert Hall like star shells. But more of both in another post.

The Prom sems to have been another episode in the BBC's (or Cameron's, or Britain's) celebration (sorry, 'commemoration') of World War 1. Like Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, the way this is developing is making me anxious too. As they say, "Other wars may also be available." Especially during this Proms Season.

Prom 25 ended, apparently as part of something called a 'Lights Out' memorialisation of the day the First World War started at midnight that same August day a hundred years ago. We were, I gather, supposed to switch off all our lights at home, bar one, to commemorate the Foreign Secrteary's "the lamps are going out all over Europe" remark. "They will not be lit again in our lifetime," he added,   though he was wrong. at least literally speaking, since they did come back on in many people's lifetimes, only to be put out again during them.

As it happens, between ten and eleven pm, I did only have one light on, but that was merely coincidental. I hadn't heard of the idea; and, pretty obviously, nor had most of my neighbours, whose living rooms and bedrooms seemed to be blazing away as brightly as a Greek Orthodox church full of candles.

At the Albert Hall, it seems the audience was given a candle to light each. One might have wondered if that idea meant the London Fire Brigade was standing by outside, but then, the candles might well have been no more likely to set the Albert Hall on fire than the BBC's LCD screens spread underneath the bust of Sir Henry Wood, which one season nearly did.

Lighting candles—it used to be cigarette lighters at festivals I remember, but I suppose, judging by the relative paucity of members of the Proms audience who join me for a quick interval cigarette during intervals, I suppose that wouldn't work any more—was to symbolise just what? An in memoriam of the dead, who at this point hadn't yet died? By an audience whose personal connection with the beginning of the war must be at least three generations away?

It seemed, to be honest, a bit of a stunt. And why read the 'obvious' poem by Wilfred Owen, which is really more about the end than the beginning, and could, surely, in a music festival, since it's in Britten's War Requiem, have been sung rather than spoken?

It jarred, somehow. It seemed too contrived. I didn't care for it; and I'm relieved now I couldn't (still being a bit too fragile) go to the RAH as I'd intended.

Though the music itself did not sound at all contrived, and more about that later as I catch up.

I only met Taverner briefly once, but I was told, after he joined the Orthodox Church, that after a while he was a little upset about it. He gave, I understood, the copyright of his music to the Church. But they didn't promote recordings of it, as he had, I think, expected. The Patriarch, or so I was told, met his queries about the dissemination of his compositions with "The Church has been existence for two thousand years; all in good time."

Whether that had a bearing on why he left, I don't know.

Apologies for my absence from blogging—and from the Proms, though I've recorded some I couldn't go to or listen to properly for later—for a few days. 

[Radio 3 relay]
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Wait for it!

"Circumstances beyond our control", as they say, mean that there's likely to be a delay in posting new reviews until this weekend. Sorry about that, but keep looking in.

Unfortunately, my colleague who wold normally fill in on these occasions is out of the country until later this month.