Another Proms season
judders into life, like a massive classical music Olympiad. Of course, this
year, there’s another festival of remarkable human achievement going on up the
road, promising to make London a no-go area for a chunk of the summer. But Prommers
are hardy folk, and they’ll continue to fill the Royal Albert Hall somehow.
The First Night was a curiously programmed celebration of British
music. Despite good intentions, I never did hear the whole thing, sampling only
Mark Anthony Turnage’s Canon Fever.
It caused a lot of ire over at The Guardian but seemed a fairly innocuous
example of the contemporary music that gets some people so het up. The first
Prom that I really got stuck into was Prom
4, in which John Adams conducted the combined orchestras of the Royal Academy
of Music and the Juilliard school. It culminated in a performance of Adams’s City Noir, his 2009 symphonic canvas
that explores the sultry atmosphere of the Californian film noir genre. Adams
presented it with the LSO a few years back and then, as now, I found it a
slightly rambling and insufficiently varied romp through the very
post-minimalist style into which the composer has settled. It still has a
cracking ending, though.
I made it to the arena for
Prom 5, to hear the BBC Philharmonic
and Juanjo Mena bringing refined lyricism to Struass’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. It
featured the British premiere of Leterna magica, by Finnish composer Kaija
Saariaho, but her fifteen minute tribute to Ingmar Bergman paled in comparison
to the masterpieces of orchestral writing with which it sat. I fear, though,
that the concert will be remembered for Anne
Schwanewilms’s performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Her poor form was
pretty astonishing and it later emerged that she was feeling ill. Certainly,
there’s little point sticking the boot into her already much discussed
problems, but if she knew she was ill, why not withdraw and save it for another
day?
Sakari
Oramo took to the podium for Prom 6 (replacing Jiri Belohlavek)
with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The programme concluded with an outing for
Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, one of the composer’s most significant works and a
piece that seems to grow and grow in stature each time I hear it. Oramo’s view
was brighter than some, making less of the sombre tone that got Prokofiev into
trouble with the Soviet authorities. But Prokofiev’s balletic colours shone
brilliantly and the sting in the tail cast a long shadow over what had gone
before.
Devil’s Trill will be away
for week 2, which continues Daniel Barenboim’s cycle of Beethoven symphonies
with the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. So you’ll have to let me know if you
enjoyed all of the Boulez with which they’re coupled, or whether the whole
things feels like a series of barbed wire sandwiches. Enjoy.
