This Year, No Fat Lady Sang . . .

In fact, all the soloists looked pretty trim and slim. Not least Janine Jansen, who polished off the Proms Season in great style with two superbly played pieces: Chausson's Poeme, and Ravel's Tzigane, the latter being one of the truly great performances of this season.

I don't usually comment on the Last Night, and don't always listen to (or watch) it, but Jansen playing the Ravel was—or is, if you didn't listen on Saturday—a performance of a calibre you don't always get when the Proms season winds down.

And a special mention for the very funny unexpected 'La Cucuracha' violin duet between her and Sakari Oramo; who, it might be suspected, was overdoing the shy bashful Finn just a bit?

 He had nothing, last night, to be bashful about, as far as his culminative concert went, though Sir Tim Rice, were he there, should have been feeling not just bashful but downright ashamed for his 'new words' to Malcolm Arnold's Peterloo.

I have never (well, hardly ever, even  in Huntingdon or in Hampshire) heard such nonsense. It's damn well insulting to anyone brought up in the north (like me!)  for the Peterloo Massacre to be transformed into such an utterly crass piece of pseudo-Brookean 'poetry', such a pathetic piece of pale third-hand patriotic pap that, I suppose, was supposed somehow to invoke Blake and 'Jerusalem'. and actually came out worse even than Alfred Noyes.

From one massacre, however, to another. As a prom-going friend (who's French)  remarked, it was pretty magnanimous of the English to put on such an outrageous celebration of their defeat by the Normans as Strauss's Taillefer. Neither of us knew it at all; she didn't care for it, for all she's on the winning side. Maybe you had to be there . . .Admittedly, though, it's a great deal more Beowulf than Bearn or Teutonic Knight than Troubadour.

It was played with considerable vigour and style, Oramao very far from bashful; bombastic, even. which suited it perfectly, if you treat it (as he did) as a glorious battle piece and (perhaps, listeninmg to the German words—vastly superior, anyway, to Tim Rice's, not difficult that—and be a little less distracted by the English subtitles) something of a spectacular. And, it would seem, unusually rare, according to Wikipedia, at any rate, which neatly updated its Taillefer page to commend another 'rare' performance at the 2014 Proms before it had actually happened . . .

And I do like Britten's arrangement of 'God Save the Queen' that ends it all. A genuine anthem, not a piece of patriotic bombast at all; Mr Rice, please note, if commissioned—and I really hope not—again.

I almost forgot, in this night of really near-superlative performances (with the obvious exception) the BBC Singers in Tavener's 'Song for Athene'; haunting, contemplative, and. while deceptively simply—innocently?—sung, of immense power thanks to them. a deserved compliment (and complement) to their work throughout a Proms Season that tends to be forgotten on last nights when they often only get to sing the choruses in Britannia . . .

Oramo. in his speech, brought up music education again, as many of his predecessors have. A waste of time, both with the pedestrian and culturally primitive government we've got at the moment and whichever one we're likely to have a couple of months before the next Proms season in 2015.

This 'Last Night' really was a memorable one; as much, for once. a concert (leaving aside the 'trad' bits) that could have been a Prom of any number, not just a celebratory race finish.

All Aboard for the Magical Mystery Play! Prom 66 Bach St Matthew Passion

We all occasionally think of some of the instruments of the orchestra as characters, but in an adult it’s no more than a momentary fancy (or a memory of a Hoffnung cartoon, perhaps for the most musically minded and less naturally quixotic) or perhaps some flash of nostalgia from a children’s story. Tubby the Tuba, perhaps, but why never Violet the Viola or Oswald the oboe?

In Peter Sellar’s ‘ritually staged’ St Matthew Passion, soloists from the Berlin Phil became part of the musical theatricality of it, playing solo characters in opposition to, or in sympathy with, the singers to whom them might normally be only orchestral accompanists. So Jesus places his hand gently on the shoulder of the double-bass player; a violinist stares at the Evangelist. Woodwind players become a strange chorus trio of instrumentalists: an enormously tall oboeist standing startlingly head and shoulders above his two colleagues on either side.

These are visual vignettes, and easy to dismiss as frothy posing too outre for a concert, perhaps outrageous for the least secular when they are applied to a religious or devotional work. I suspect (since I saw eight or nine people leave from ‘my’ door as I zoomed my wheelchair down the ramp for my interval cigarette after the first part) some of the audience did.

Apart from possibly failing to recall that the Passion is written in what is pretty much vernacular German for a mass audience—though not quite as earthy as the English Mystery Cycles—many of whom would probably not have been able to read, or at least not effortlessly, they missed one of the most important revelatory performances of this Proms season.

It was played by a ‘Reduced Philharmoniker’; about a third its number, and all of them playing like virtuoso soloists, even if they were not all given starring soloist roles. Not only was it a ‘reduced’ orchestra, it was divided: into what were, effectively, two chamber orchestras; as was the choir.

It was, at first, somewhat odd to see a peripatetic Simon Rattle walking briskly from one to the other rather reminiscent of television rolling news presenters stalking back and forth along a huge screen; but one got used to it. In fact, since the quality of the soloists’ singing was so high, and the choir so operatically expressive, both vocally and in physical expression and mobility, it rapidly became somehow perfectly natural.

Bringing solo instruments out of the orchestra to interact with the soloists gave this performance a diamond clarity of tone and colour and emphasis of instrumental parts that is normally the province of small authentic instrument ensembles. Whether the sound engineers translated this as effectively for the radio relay I don’t yet know, not yet having listened to my recording, but in the Albert Hall it was revelatory.

And even that was somehow drafted in to add to the theatrical effect of what is, in any case, a potentially gripping drama for instruments and voices. Pilate and Jesus were each found a spot up in the gallery still with an echo for suitable hollow doomy sound effects, with no technical sonic trickery required.

Of the soloists, special mentions, I think, for Mark Padmore (Evangelist) especially, who sustained a long night with amazing applomb and strength, while at the same time turning into an accomplished mime artist, and Magdalena Kozena.

There’s much more to be written on this; especially in the effect treating the St Matthew Passion as part Noh play, part Miracle or Mystery Play, part Nixon in China, has on the purely musical experience. That, hopefully, somewhat later.

Rattle and Sellars, with the BBC’s lighting director as co-conspirator, succeeded in almost breaking the record for the longest holding-off of audience applause. Admittedly, that was partly due to a little uncertainty as the lights faded down to almost black and left both hall and stage as though they were lit by a handful of candles. The lights were brought up again, and the majority—I looked around and did see less enthusiastic dissenters—of the audience erupted after what had really been an enormously respectful, even awed, silence, with total enthusiasm and demanded several ‘curtain calls’.

What a shame the BBC didn’t film it so everybody could have joined in for this truly magical musical mystery tour.

If you want to read the kind of stuffy curmudgeonly review that would have put me off ever going to any classical music concert before I was seventy (and is surely partly to blame at least for few Prom concerts having even a substantial minority of 25's and unders around) it has to be Rupert Christiansen's in the Telegraph. In another season, I'd be saying 'Bah! Humbug!'

The Introspector Calls: Proms 53, 62 and 64; in brief

The BPO's instrument transporter outside the Albert Hall; does it have a gym inside?


One of the joys of a Proms season is listening to a carefully composed programme that offers new insights into music which the audience might have heard many times before. Concerts that are narratives; that tell a story, illuminate a history, that are conceived as a whole.

We've recently had three. First, Ivan fischer's Brahms 3 and 4 with the Budapest, which was not simply the Third Symphony followed by the Fourth; it was "Brahms' symphonic imagination, parts two and three." then there was the vibrato-free Norrington and the Stuttgart, with Beethoven's Eighth, Berlioz's 'Romeo Alone' and Dvorak's Ninth.

Finally, last night, with Rattle and the Berlin in Prom 64, Rachmaninov's 'Symphonic Dances' followed by Stravinsky's 'Firebird'.

Let's go back, for a moment, to Norrington and Prom 62. In Prom 54, Gardiner had very elegantly produced a Missa Solemnis to win over those of us (like me, I 'm afraid) who really don't get the thing at all. Perhaps we should try to imagine it as a long kind of highly ceremonial coronation anthem for the mitredom (or installment, enthronement or whatever it is) of an Archbishop, as I found myself trying to do.

Otherwise, it does seem to be difficult to grasp, and for all Gardiner cleverly played up the occasional resemblances to the Ninth to encourage us, for me it still does.

If Beethoven's Seventh really is 'the apotheosis of the dance', Norrington and his Stuttgart orchestra made both the Eighth, the Berlioz, and Dvorak's Ninth a combinative illustration of the zenith of spiritual dance. The Beethoven was the epitome of clarity—vibrato-less playing assisting no end—and conducted as a decisive link between the Seventh and Ninth. And, being Norrington, vigorous and fast-paced too.

Norrington, too, placed the double basses up beyond the brass at the 'top' of the orchestra, which was extremely effective this time for both the Eighth and the Dvorak. The Dvorak was decidedly novel, and the Largo clearly discomfited much of the audience; it was not so much a 'spiritual' of the slave south, but spiritual; you could almost see the ectoplasm.

Clearly, judging by the coughing during this quiet passage, this disomfited some of the audience (as it appears to have at least one critic), since all too many were concentrating on their coughing rather than on any new insight to the Ninth this might have given them. Had they allowed themselves more introspection, perhaps it night have dawned that Norrington was telling us there was rather more Beethoven in Dvorak—or Dvorak in Beethoven?—than we might have thought.

Before we get to Rattle and the Berlin ("Let's rattle and roll" I think some of the Arena shouted) I'd like to demand that Pronms-goers who buy seats should be either given score-reading lessons, or at least presented with a time-sheet that tells them when the orchestra will be playing pianissimo and when fff, so they will know to orchestrate their hacking coughs with the loudest bits.

Not for the first time, Rattle and the Berlin strained (or should have done) the audience's ears in another record-breaking attempt for the quietest ppp from a large orchestra ever heard (or barely heard) in the Albert Hall in the Firebird. Rattle knows the Albert Hall well, of course, but this was pushing the boundaries even for him and the amazing control of the Berlin players.  He packed off three trumpeters to the gallery too—sonething that doesn't always come off!— for the Firebird, to great effect.

This was a Firebird that was elegant ballet and wistful and delciately coloured in every feather; and crashingly vivid and violent, tail feathers flying and wings beating furiously, the dissonances grabbed by the scruff of the neck and forced into your ears in wild and panicky contrast.

A superb and memorable performance that could not have been achieved without a good deal of introspection. the initial piece was similarly, I suspect, a surprise to much of the audience. There were, for once, quite a few youngsters about, which is something of a relief after seeing all too many grey heads at some Proms.

Whether they found either the Symphonic Dances or the Firebird quite as accessible as they may have thought I'm uncertain. The Rachmaninov was played, fascinatingly, not as a brassy shpoowpiece, but also, in parts unusually introspectively as though it was Rachmaninov's 'Previously Unknown' Symphony. Both performances were grandly symphonic; and fascinating to hear.

The Berlin played gloriously. The strings, particularly used up a lot of elbow grease;  I wondered if the Berlin's transport parked outside had brought a gym along for them. Rattle—as Norrington had—conducted without a score. The double basses, however, were in their usual place . . .Bit of a surprise seeing a 'normal' orchestral disposition again.

The lighting effects were the usual blue; what this year seems to be the favoured colour; but for that particular reversion to the traditional (the only one of the night) I thought they might have tried sepia. The lighting producer is playing around a bit this year: Prommers at a late Prom are greeted with a 'stretched' photo of the Albert Hall  at night spread over the LCD screens at the back of the orchestra . . .It's daylight for the earlier ones, I noticed. Subtle, eh?

At the end, after lengthy applause, Rattle—who was very nice about the Proms-goers, despite the damnable coughers!—had the band turn around with him and salute Henry Wood. This was one of the nights—I may sometimes moan we don't always get enough of them in a season—you really do have to pay homage and pour libations to the Muses and the spirit of the man.

Elektrafying?

I'm now feeling thoroughly foolish, not having gone to Prom 59 and Strauss's Elektra. From the excellent review in Boulezian it looks increasingly like poor judgement.

I shall just rather mournfully reflect that two hours without an interval would have probably resulted in me strangling myself trying not to cough or sneeze, and they'd have had to have an ambulance waiting at Door 8 for me well before it was half over anyway.

I shall have to wait for the Radio 3 repeat. (Hoping there will be one: one is never too sure about R3 repeating Proms operas, especially as it gets later in the season.) All the same, I'm still unsure I really could have taken another Elektra.

At Covent Garden, as I and (I hope) many of the audience were still a bit shaky from the impact, three young 'fashionistas' alongside me blabbered about where they were going to eat and knock back the champers. (Having, of course, turned on their iPhones for a look at a restaurant guide before the cast had finished taking their bows.)  One looked, I now recall, disturbingly like that guy in a yoghourt TV commercial I keep seeing who patronisingly pats a sofa, sits a girl down and assures her that a spoonful of a dairy product is the only thing that will enhance her existence to the point of ecstasy.

I cannot understand how some people could be so emotionally distanced and uninvolved. Shallow, even. But then, if you can believe for two minutes that a path strewn with spilled yoghourt is the one to Nirvana, it may be easier than I thought. Opera, surely, however artificial it can be dramatically—at least often in terms of plot and characterisation compared to theatre—is not that unengaging on either count. Or that artificial in relation to real emotional life. Especially not if it's Strauss.

Would they, I wondered, have casually left a performance of Lear chattering about how they knew a pretty girl like Cordelia who'd been left an orphan and what kind of vintage might her husband grow in France that would cheer her up? And maybe how Gloucester should have gone to SpecSavers? Probably.

I did, however, get to the Chamber Prom on Monday (I see why the BBC calls them 'Proms Chamber Music', though it's still hard to stifle a little schoolboy snigger) though I was not altogether enamoured of Benjamin Grosvenor and don't think I'll write it up; people will begin to think I have some kind of aversion to young prizewinners.

Judith Weir's 'Day Break Shadows Flee' was fascinating, though I thought I detected many more strands of complexity, especially of tonal colour, and left-hand/right-hand interplay than Grosvenor achieved. A lot of breakages, and not quite enough shadows. I wondered if Weir thought so, too: I could see her just a couple of rows in front of me shaking her head, though, being behind her, whether that was out of some kind of nervousness I couldn't tell.

That's one of this year's commissions we really ought to hear in the future in other painists' repertoire.

I listened at home, under the influence of paracetamol and hot lemon again, to Dutoit and the RPO's very lively Prom 60. Very cheering-upping, and more on that later. And, perhaps, more on the rather odd pre-Prom chat that didn't seem entirely certain whether it was supposed to prove Respighi was a Mussolini Fascist, whether Italian Fascism in the Twenties was relatively benign, or whether Respighi was just an enthusiastic post Garibaldi d'Annunzio-reading Italian Nationalist. . .

Hopefully the cold will have been banished for Wednesday's Norrington, Friday's Berlin, and Saturday's Bach. . .

Meanwhile, do read Mark Berry's review of Elektra.

I whiled away a little of my time the other night trying to distract myself from my cold and woolly head with a thriller by William Boyd, Waiting for Sunrise. It begins in Vienna in the first decade of the 20th century: the years of Dr Freud and the spread of psychoanalyst's—'alienists'—couches. I won't bother you with the plot or the story, but Boyd explores a little of the psychology of 'selbstmord' (more than simply 'suicide') as it might relate to sexuality and stylised—maybe corrupted—concepts of 'honour' and 'morality'. 

And Vienna, about then, he writes quite convincingly of as a hothouse of sexuality, as much as Isherwood's Berlin. It's had me thinking; that, of course, is the era of Elektra and Salome. And, as the Glyndebourne Rosenkavalier production disturbingly suggested (despite Ticciati's, I thought, rather naive suggestion in a radio interview that it was fifty per cent  comedy fifty per cent bedroom farce and move along, nothing else to see here) sexually-induced psychological—and emotional— 'selbstmord' isn't perhaps that absent from that opera either. 

This, I think, is something I might mull over, spending rather more time with Strauss than I have for a while, perhaps coming back to it  on my 'audiobritain' website. Looking back, it was probably a mistake to have been thinking too much of Nietsche at school when I was discovering Strauss—the orchestral music, anyway, I was a latecomer to opera apart from Britten—and not enough of Freud who I'd also begun to read then. 

Heads Up! Prom 59, Strauss's Salome

Increasingly, we've come to see a kind of hybrid with opera performances at the Proms. Something part way between the static concert performance, everyone static behind a single microphone each, and what is pretty well a full stage performance just with minimalised scenery and props.

The Runnicles/Deutsche Oper Salome for Prom 59 was that kind of hybrid; characters making their exits and entrances; popping up above the bust of Henry Wood in front of the organ console; Herod and his wife gazing on with obvious loathing expressed in their stances at the end from the top of the stairs that run alongside the stalls.

It was in the singers' expressions (if you could see them, of course) that gripped as much as the singing and the playing; the Jews' chorus in animated argument that looked as though it would break into a riot that might go crashing through the Arena at any moment; Nina Stemme,  particularly, showing signs of an erotic obsession any teenager might have for a pop idol. . .until you realised it was for a severed head.

I came, in fact (I admit to something of a fancy for Grand Guignol moments, alas) to half-expect that a severed head on a silver platter might actually appear from somewhere, so intense that was; but fortunately no-one was tempted. the intensity and tension by then needing no bathetic stimulus to the imagination.

There is something about Strauss's extraordinary ability to turn eroticism into obsessive, even pathological, sexuality that is really disturbing; and the more so when a conductor and orchestra grasp the nuances of how it is expressed in the music as well as Runnicles and The Deutsche Oper orchestra. Neither sheered away either from risking the aspects of clashing atonalism that I've not really heard so clearly in the texture of the score before.

Runnicles—who conducted like an athlete—created a tension and intensity throughout with great skill, not once lapsing into melodrama, nor once falling into luxuriousness, tempting as it can be to turn Herod's Palace, musically anyway, into a kind of plush and velvet Viennese brothel In fact, despite the large orchestral forces, the score seldom sounded oppressed by them; it was, in many ways, almost sparse.

Especially in Salome's dance; one, for once, not merely of overt profligate sexuality suited to a pole dancer in a 'gentleman's club', but of contradictory erotic insight, experimental sexuality, and the fear of its perversion. The veils —and this is one virtue of a concert performance rather than a stage production—were so much more psychological coverings being stripped away than physical ones.

It was something of a surprise to find that, apparently, Salome is not actually in the Deutsche Oper's recent repertoire. No-one would have guessed it from the orchestra's playing; though one might from some of the singers, either from the scores before them, or their signs of slight weakness in projecting to a full Albert Hall.

I was rather surprised that that applied even to Nina Stemme, from whom I had expected a stronger voice; but then the Albert Hall is difficult at the best of times, more so when you have an orchestra that size just behind you instead of below you in a pit. Samuel Youn—Jokanaan—had some momentary difficulties, but that may have been partly due to misjudging the distance he'd had to run from stage to organ loft: it's a longish way round the back through the corridors . . .

The organ, since it had a spot or two already on it for that purpose, was pressed into service for a pedal note or two, which, quite unexaggerated (quite unlike its use in the War Requiem!) one felt as a sense of unease creeping around the Albert Hall more than a note. . .

It was a little difficult to follow the lyrics (not sure that's quite the right word for this kind of story) from up in the Circle, though that of course, might have been partly due to the cold I somehow acquired at the weekend still muffling my eardrums a little. Not enough, however, not to be able to appreciate this was a stunning, utterly absorbing, performance.

It was a superb reminder that Strauss's musical insight into sexuality is extraordinary. And, even including Rosenkavalier along with Elektra, rather unnerving. Freud—who seems to have been notoriously tone deaf*—with an orchestra instead of a couch, no doubt about it.

*In psycho-analysis, it's termed 'melophobia' (a rather unimaginative and pedestrian coinage, surely; couldn't we have had 'polyhymnophobia'?) and, of course, people have delved into Freud's own neuroses and background in search of reasons. But 'tone-deaf' probably serves as as good an explanation as any.

This is one of the recordings of this season's Proms I shall have to keep. I skipped Elektra. I still haven't quite got over the RoH production (even though it must now be nearly a year back!) and I wasn't sure I could take that kind of searing emotional shock again just yet. Nor, I fear, did I listen to it, having taken to my bed again with hot lemon juice, aspirin and the cough I'd managed to suppress—and as for once, almost everyone else in the RAH did too, which tells you something about the concentration attracted by Prom 59!—during Salome. . .

IPlayer

(Radio 3 repeat not yet scheduled)