Oh What a Lovely War: Prom 16, Gabriel Prokoviev Violin Concerto '1914'

It was supposed to be 'the war to end all wars'. As we know all too well, that was a forlorn hope. Indeed, when historians come to write the history of the last decade of the nineteenth century, the twentieth and very probably much of this one, some time perhaps in 2114, it will not be in chapters headed 'The Great War', or 'The Second World War' or the 'Great Patriotic War, or 'The Iraq war' or 'Operation Enduring Freedom' or Operation Cast Lead'. 

It will be 'The Hundred and Fifty Years' War. Or, if one is a pacifist of growingly pessimistic bent, perhaps 'The Two Hundred Years' War.' After all, war has hardly ever ceased, and it is all around us.

Most of us, I dare say, think of war as mass killing. In imagining the 'softening up' bombardments of the First War, the 'Thousand Bomber' raids of the Second, the 'WMD's' more recently, especially in the West, war has become almost impersonal.  But the artillery shell, the drone-fired missile, the bullet that kills you is a very individual, in that last split second, or, if you are unlucky, longer, a very personal thing.

In Gabriel Prokofiev's  Violin Concerto it is the violin that is that precise, fragile aspect of individuality of war; sometimes strained, sometimes weary, mostly fearing. It is the orchestra that is the instrumentality of war: the twang of bullets hitting barbed wire or ricocheting; the percussion of shells and bombardment, the rattle of machine guns or an AK47. The sounds, as you perceive them as an individual, somehow distant from you, not yet murderously personal.

It was the tension of the wider, general, destructive threat as played in the orchestral parts, counterpoised against the slightly lost, sometimes anguished, almost always not-quite-comprehending that made Gabriel Prokofiev's Concerto so striking.

Yes, it was programmatic in a sense that perhaps we want to eschew now; but it was a programme that was also musical narrative, part soundtrack to memories of scratchy film and more recent blurred cockpit video. It was a landscape of trenches and ruins; of memories of August relaxation and dances; of better times gone, sometimes fleetingly present, and the constant awareness of probably worse to come.

War has not changed much, for all the drones and distant hands on joysticks and Playstation falsity of the video stories. It hasn't changed at all for the people who die. Singly, individually, for who war ends still as a personal surprise and affront. 

It was a tremendously evocative and cleverly, hauntingly, constructed piece; the violin played with great insight by Daniel Hope, and accompanied superbly by the Istanbul orchestra. All of whom, after the seconds of silence at its end as the audience let it all sink in, were justly rewarded with a long spell of applause.

It was, perhaps, appropriate that a Turkish orchestra should perform this world premier. Some three million people in the Ottoman Empire died as a consequence of that war, too.

Above left: a silk 'in Memoriam' bookmark with the photograph of a WW1 soldier.

My grandfather (or more accurately, my grandmother's first husband, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps at the beginning of the war; he was killed just ten days before the Armistice, in some small battle in Flanders hardly anyone has heard of. Private Ainsworth was a relative.

Photo: the ruins of Ypres; the market square, 1917. (Unattributed.)

Photo: the ruins of Gaza, 2014. (Unattributed)

Radio 3 live relay; repeated Wednesday 30th July, R3 1400; iPlayer

Passion's Flowers: Prom 12 Bach St John Passion, Norrington

Photo: Eric Hossinger

What would a Prom season be without a little controversy? Classical concert-goers have become tame since the good old days when they'd trash a hall over the Rite of Spring.  Norrington, said the presenter of this Prom, "practically caused a riot here at the Proms six years ago conducting Elgar with no vibrato. . ."

I was around that week, but I don't recall any remnants of torn-up seats thrown from the Circle littering the Arena, or the burnt shells of overturned BBC outside broadcast vans round the side of the Albert Hall, or that lingering sting of tear-gas wafting across Kensington Gardens.

As far as classical music goes, all passion's spent. I mean, audiences these days hardly say 'boo' even to that ridiculous misbegotten charade of a Russalka at Covent Garden, and if anything ever deserved, if not the Floral Hall scattered in shards of glass and the Piazza burning, at least a few handfuls of rotten tomatoes thrown at the director, that did.

It was a shame, I thought at the time, that the vegetable market ever took its ammunition so inaccessibly far across the river to collect during the interval. Otherwise I could have done my imitation of the Portobello stall holder who, when trade was a bit slack, used to yell "Come alive, pawt-o-bellah!" "Come alive, Covent Garden! Get yer rotten tomaters 'ere!"

Photo: Norrington et. al. in rehearsal (Ben Palmer)

Apparently, it's fifteen years since Norrington last visited the St John, which is quite a while to digest an approach. But it exhibited what one might call a trademark, the knack of separating instrumental and vocal textures, examining the essence of them, and re-constituting the whole so that you can follow the process, and the rationale for it, as it were at the back of your mind without it distracting from the whole performance.

And so it was here; pared-down Bach, almost sparse Bach, but with the apple of the music peeled so carefully you could rewind the whole and hardly know the apple had been pared down to the core at all.

I like 'spare Bach', and both Zurich orchestra and chorus were perfect for that purpose and style, suiting what I take to be Norrington's intent perfectly. It is an approach that also—and I think rightly, this being the music of the early 18th century, to which might have had its own angst and uncertainties, but was metaphysical about them, not romantic; half a century before Rousseau made confession public —cool and considered without being in the least cold or unsympathetic. Instrumentally, in particular, this was a very metaphysical reading.

A little less purely so, perhaps, with the soloists, though it would be wrong to attribute too much gratuitous emotion to what was, with all of the soloists, but especially James Gilchrist, splendid articulation and phrasing. Though the countertenor, Clint van der Linde perghaps, early on, betrayed a certain lack of confidence and surety. Then again, the Albert Hall is not a sympathetic venue for counter-tenors.

As to the faster tempi that the audience might have found 'controverisal'? Not as far as I could tell; Norrington seemed to me to be taking it a a perfect pace, exactly suited to the forces playing it in the Albert Hall.

As I wrote briefly, I am not a great fan of the Bach Passions; nor, to be honest, of religious choral works generally. (I can't get on at all with Parsifal, either.)  But, should I ever feel an urgent need to hear a St John Passion, my recording of this is probably one I would come back.

What is with this season though? Both tenor and baritone were replacements; at this rate by mid-September, the Proms will have fielded more substitutes than all the penalty shoot-outs in the World Cup.

I listened to the Radio 3 relay at home on R3, and congratulations to the sound engineers for an excellent sound balance. Listening to small ensembles (not to mention a counter-tenor) in the Albert Hall can be tricky depending on where you sit, or stand. For this Prom, it might be that the broadcast listeners had the best of it.

Although, with my windows wide open on Saturday night, I heard the usual complement of sirens dopplering away into the night (perhaps one or two more than usual, but no doubt heading for the Israeli embassy or its environs up the road from the Albert Hall, which has been attracting greater numbers than most Prom concerts recently)  as far as I know, there was no riot at the Albert Hall. So I've washed the vinegar out of the hanky I had ready to put over my nose and mouth just in case.

Repeated BBC4 31st July; iPlayer (Part 1); iPlayer (Part 2).

Visualising the Proms

It suddenly struck me that my Prom habits are a little paradoxical. I've tended to think of a TV broadcast of a Prom as distracting and at home prefer to listen to the audio on Radio 3 with no visuals except any my imagination might conjure up in my head. As the cliche has it, radio has better pictures.

Yet when I can I prefer , it occurs to me, to see as well as hear a Prom in the Albert Hall rather than listen to it at home; and yet I don't think of that as distracting. I seldom sit there with my eyes closed. So tonight I feel I ought to try to resolve the paradox. I didn't really concentrate  on the China Phil's Prom, but it's broadcast on BBC 4 tonight. Hopefully including the encore, which everyone seems to think was a lot of fun and which I missed altogether.

Television analogue audio is generally awful, but since I have a more hi-fi-amenable set up now, I might as well use it. So I shall watch in HD, and, hopefully listen the same way, with the digital output of my Humax tuner through a digital-to-analogue converter and my serious hi-fi system.

I will, probably, be a little distracted, as I sometimes am when the BBC cameras are in the Albert Hall. As I sometimes am in the theatre or the opera. I blame it on my mis-spent youth, some of which was spent as an Assistant Stage Manager for a theatre.

Which means in Covent Garden, I can't help but check out the lighting rigs and thinking about the technicalities of the scene changes while I'm watching the activity and the singers on the stage. So it is sometimes in the Albert Hall, for all the BBC's cameramen are dressed to impinge as little as possible on the audience's attention, from head-to-toe in black. I always wonder exactly what is on those notepads attached to the sides of the cameras that the cameramen (and women) flip the pages of every few minutes.

Instructions from the director as to when to move, when to zoom, when to pull back, I presume. I can't imagine that the camera operators are all following marked-up miniature scores, though it wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out some of them are more knowledgeable about music than the tennis that presumably some, or all, of them were filming at Wimbledon shortly before.

I know, though, I shall be distracted by one thing. I can't help it, but I'm always fascinated by most directors' ability to focus on the instruments of the orchestra as their parts appear in the score. So I shall be looking out for when Camera 3 is still on the violins when Camera 4 should be on the horns . . .

Now, should it be gunpowder green, jasmine, or Assam for the interval?

Right up Stalin-Allee: Prom 7 Shostakovich 10

In a Proms season of anniversaries, this particular Prom is, perhaps, a year adrift for a memorial in round decades. But 61 years on, and with what's happening in eastern Ukraine, and with the growing blatancy of Russia Today's propaganda, it could be a timely reminder. Especially as for quite a few years now, in some sections of Russian society, and among some minds, Stalin's been becoming  a pussycat, Gulag claws neatly filed away.

I don't know whether Jiří Bělohlávek had anything like that in mind, though he was a young man of 22 in that first of many springs that turn to frosty winter in Prague of 1968. Musicians are not notoriously political.

True, the first movement was taken more quietly, more gently, perhaps, than one might expect; and seemingly on the slow side, though the emphasis there should be on the adverb. But only compilers of comparison lists listen to one movement of a symphony at a time, instead of following it through as a whole, and by the time Bělohlávek came to the Andante forty minutes or so later, it should have dawned that was the softness of the soft shoe shuffle of the secret police. As threatening as anything more pointed.

If the Allegretto (the supposed 'portrait of Stalin' if you believe Volkov, and I've never been too eager to) was less brutal and fierce than other examples, it made the point that you can be a villain, but a smiling one. In oppressive states, under tyrannies, it is usually safer to pay attention to the second and pretend not to note the first.

And in that mood, nor was the Allegro so abandoned. Stalin may have been in the grave, or under a Kremlin wall, or wherever he is, for more than half a century, but it would be over-confident to be too sure the 'ism' though it might have been lying low, is lying forever dead. And that I think, was what this thoughtful, carefully paced and un-flamboyant performance was about. Threats like that, as the last movement of this performance should have insinuated into the audience's minds by then, are not so easily dissipated with a roaring climax.

However much I'd like to believe that too. And will stick for the future with a recording, shall we say, with a brasher certainty about it?

Heard via  iPlayer.

Spirits of the Forest: Prom 9 Janacek, Glagolitic Mass

Photo credit: National Museum of Denmark, detail, the 'Gundestrup Cauldron'; created some time in the first or second century BC in what is now south-west Romania or north-west Bulgaria.


At the age of fifteen, it seems, Janacek joined  a pilgrimage of 40, 000 people to sing in the open air in honour of St Cyril.  That's about seven times the number you get in the Albert Hall for the last night lustily singing 'Jerusalem'; one imagines those 40,000 sang very lustily indeed.

It must have been as impressive and memorable to a young Janacek as a couple of days at Glastonbury would be to a teenager now, though possibly without any naked mud baths (but you never know how the Spirit takes some people) and bearing in mind the Glastonbury crowd, as far as I know, doesn't go much for mass community singing.

How I got the impression they were singing hymns in a forest, I can't really say, but if there was an imaginary locus in which to place Gergiev and the LSO orchestra and chorus for Janacek's Glagolitic Mass that is what it had to be. The musical spirits of this forest were far more pagan than Christian; more hamadryad than holy, to be fended off with loud and enthusiastic singing. As much, perhaps, out of the strength the fear of dark places, uncertainly tamed or exorcised, gives you as religious commitment.

Certainly, that is how the splendidly vehement and vigorous LSO Chorus sounded. And, whether it was spirits or beasts of the forest that were to be kept at bay by sheer volume of sound and energy, Gergiev's Maryinsky soloists (not to mention the Albert Hall organ) weren't lacking either.

As we all know, time has its own gearbox. (If you live in London as I do, it seldom seems to get out of third or fourth. In a small village in France I visit often, it hardly ever seems to get out of first.) I had the distinct impression that Gergiev was rather forcing the pace. Checking the timings, though, he can't have been. He just had a highly-tuned machine, obviously.

The initial intrada did sound almost frenetic, not to say fierce. but, whether it was the reconstructed score, or Gergiev, there was a majestic and commanding orchestral tonal colour from the start, modulated by an almost surprisingly pastoral folk-iness at the appropriate moments.

I noticed that a Guardian reader was put out by the score for this performance being referred to as a 'reconstruction', whereas it might properly be called a 'reversion' to the original. (The 2011 Prom—BBC SO/ and Chorus//Jiří Bělohlávek—to which the reader refers, and insists was preferable by far, however, was also a 'reconstruction') This is a useful short guide to Paul Wingfield's edition:

The main differences between the two versions are as follows: the original reinstates the Intrada movement at the beginning of the mass as well as in its usual place at the end. This gives the Mass a perfect arch form with Věruju (Credo) as its centerpiece. There are meter changes in both the Úvod (Introduction) and especially in the Gospodi, pomiluj (Kyrie) where 5/4 meter was originally conceived and then switched to easier 4/4. The Věruju movement contains the largest changes, with the orchestral middle section, the "Raspet" (an orchestral commentary on the Crucifixion), longer and more complex in the original version and containing a wild section with three sets of timpani omitted in the revised version, as well as off-stage clarinets. Finally, the Svet (Sanctus) movement is extended thrillingly near the end, reaching ever higher and higher.

[John L Webb, MusicWeb International]

I shall probably add to this a little later, but I was feeling a bit bad about the delay.