From the tangy brass fanfares of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast to the joyful cries of “Freude” in Beethoven’s Ninth to the crazed fairground religiosity of Poulenc’s organ concerto, the opening week of the 2015 BBC Proms tossed its stack of aurally glittering plates in the air and kept them spinning. Fiddler on the Roof and British Asian DJ Naughty Boy reached out to new audiences. Almost as amazing as having multiple world, UK or London premieres in the first week alone was the arguably more challenging feat of squeezing in two works by Haydn – a composer of incalculable genius not merely dead but virtually extinct judging by recent showings.
The school’s-out mood of the first few nights – inevitably hard to sustain over eight weeks – was helped by packed houses (on the nights I attended), the silent attention of some 6,000 people, the audible gasps from those entering the Royal Albert Hall for the first time or reacquainting themselves, and never mind the, to express it politely, eccentric acoustic. The Proms may never suit all connoisseurs, but for many of us these two months of concerts remain, year after year, a place of discovery and adventure, a foundation for a lifetime’s listening. The American soprano Angel Blue reminds us that no country in the world has anything comparable, and no BBC to make it happen.
The BBC Symphony Orchestra sounded incisive and crisp on First Night, the influence of Sakari Oramo, also a violinist, as music director already audible in the strings, especially in the overture to Nielsen’s Maskarade. Lars Vogt was an inventive soloist in Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto D466. The full BBCSO forces excelled in contrasting takes on the biblical story of Belshazzar’s feast, from the hushed exoticism of Sibelius to the epic choral showpiece which remains one of Walton’s best-loved works. Bass-baritone Christopher Maltman and the combined forces of the well-drilled BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC National Chorus of Wales raised the roof. Gary Carpenter’s well-crafted and witty Dadaville, inspired by Max Ernst’s 1924 painting in Tate Liverpool, began with spiky modernity and metamorphosed into a brilliant funk ending with a dazzle of indoor fireworks: a clever and serious first premiere of the season. (There will be 32 in all.) Better known as an arranger/orchestrator (The Wicker Man, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Carpenter (born 1951) has a lot of musical voices, all interesting.
The prompt for John Woolrich’s Falling Down (Prom 4), a capricho for double bassoon and orchestra (2009), was also visual: Goya’s Los Caprichos, in which the shadows produced by aquatint, a dark sugar process he invented, were reflected in the dusky rumbles of contra bassoon and orchestra. Woolrich wrote it for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, specifically their outstanding contra bassoon player, Margaret Cookhorn. Beguiling though her playing was throughout, the balance between soloist and orchestra did not come across well in the Albert Hall. Symphony Hall, Birmingham, where it was premiered, may have been kinder. The CBSO then bid a final farewell, as it were – they have already said goodbye in Birmingham – to Andris Nelsons in a finely detailed if slightly mannered account of Beethoven’s Ninth, with good soloists (especially soprano Lucy Crowe) and fine work from the CBSO Chorus, singing from memory.
The BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Thomas Søndergård, having already been busy in two Ten Pieces Proms for schools at the weekend, gave an oddly mixed programme on Tuesday (Prom 6): Poulenc’s concerto for organ (admirable soloist James O’Donnell), timpani and strings, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Haydn’s Te Deum and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony No 41. The Haydn, triumphant and festive, came across well, whereas the Stravinsky sounded slightly ragged and the Mozart too uniform, as if a steam iron had smoothed the woodwind eccentricities or the eruptive inner-voice harmonies of the second movement. Yes, the work has a C major nobility, but Mozart is never without anarchy. The expert leader, Lesley Hatfield, seemed to understand this: her playing, palpably, was full of variety and detail, but those behind her didn’t entirely follow her cue.
In this packed week, other highlights, all heard on Radio 3 or online, included Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s gem-like tribute to Tallis, sung by the Cardinall’s Musick, directed by Andrew Carwood, in the first Cadogan Hall lunchtime Prom of the season. HK Gruber’s Into the open… for percussion and orchestra, dedicated to the memory of the distinguished publisher David Drew, gave brilliant rein to both soloist (Colin Currie) and orchestra (BBC Philharmonic). On Wednesday (Prom 7) Hugh Wood’s expansive Epithalamion, a John Donne setting for chorus and orchestra complete with two harps, begun in 1955 and finished last year, had its celebratory premiere.
Life went on, hard to believe, away from the Proms. In the last week of its current season, Wigmore Hall played host to one of the year’s most staggering concerts: a programme of Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski given by Igor Levit, a 28-year-old Russian-born German who has been called the pianist of the future, the next András Schiff (though he is his own person, and how), the greatest player of his generation. On first live encounter – his CDs of late Beethoven and Bach have already made an impact – not a word of this is hype. He is back to perform in his first Prom in September. You’ll hear more of him. I don’t need a crystal ball to guarantee it.
