Proms 2019

Normally I would go to 8-9 Proms but I only saw a few Proms this year, as I was starting my 3 months volunteer human rights observer work in Palestine from 2 August 2019. I got to see:

Haydn’s Creation – which was in some ways the most enjoyable evening, because it was a really joyful performance of a work which I have never really been that interested in; I have a recording of course, but it must be years since I played it. I remember going to one performance about 8-9 years ago at the RFH – starry names (I think the OAE and Rattle) and leaving after the first half because I was so bored. This one was much less starry  – the BBC Phil, soloists who were competent but not outstanding. The people who made the concert special, I thought, were the ad hoc choir, called The BBC Proms Youth Choir, essentially the choruses of various music colleges and universities, and the BBC Phil’s new chief conductor, Omer Meir Welber. The latter directed from the harpsichord (which, mysteriously got changed at the interval, I thought, but a review said it had been changed to a fortepiano – not sure why!) but, despite what I would have thought was a handicap to expressive control, he led a really rhythmically tight, punchy performance that moved sprightly along; he also encouraged some both energetic and, at times, beautifully phrased quiet moments – when moon and stars appear, and when the birds start singing, for instance. Most of the time he was almost using his elbows to conduct, as he bounced up and down doing the continuo bits. The choir(s) – 4 different groups – was/were large, and sounded amazing, and not at all either stodgy (which might have been the case with an older group of similar size) or hesitant (as young singers). I have to say I was totally gripped by this work in a way I never have been before.  Much of it I suppose is standard Haydn, but illuminated by many hundreds of little touches of genius in the accompaniment and inner voices of the orchestra (the strings of which in this performance incidentally seemed to be playing without vibrato). Apparently and I suppose appropriately David Attenborough was in the audience though I didn’t spot him!

The two concerts with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Yannick Nezet Seguin were on the whole extraordinarily good. The orchestra’s sound is very refined – beautiful woodwind and string playing, with lovely dove-tailing of sound from instrumental group to another. But, crucially – and perhaps this was also the effect of Yannick – it was a beauty that always seemed to be serving the music and the intentions of the composer, not just a beautiful ‘sound for sounds’ sake’ such as I’ve complained about with Rattle and the BPO. At the same time the playing was also very energetic and powerful when it needed to be, particularly in the finale of the Shostakovich – brilliant trumpet and timpani playing. The performance of Beethoven 2 was very good but I thought the conductor was wrong in the (too fast) tempi chosen for the first movement, which the BRSO could well keep up with well enough but (a familiar theme of mine) which diminished the power and energy of the music. Although I seem to have heard a lot of Shostakovich 5’s in recent years – including with Gergiev and his Maryinsky orchestra – this I thought was the best of them – a particularly moving slow movement with the wonderful BRSO strings hardly whispering at times in grief and then building up to an enormous climax (the dynamics of the performance were extreme, but , again, not in a self-indulgent show-offy way but enhancing one’s understanding and appreciation of the piece). And the balance achieved – whether this is Yannick or what the orchestra naturally does I am not sure – was extraordinary; details I had never heard before in the Shostakovitch came across clearly in beautifully layered sound.

Much the same in the second concert – a superb performance of Sibelius 1, a light extremely well crafted Prokofiev VC 2, and a riotous orchestral suite from Der Rosenkavalier (I need to look up who compiled the suite – it had more ‘numbers’ in it than some).

Before the second performance of the BRSO a rather extraordinary thing happened – in the 70’s I used to go to the Proms (and other London musical events throughout the year) with a group of University friends. In particular there were two guys from the same Cambridge college as me. I last saw the one in about 1988 and the other about the same time. Then all of us lost touch with each other, disappearing into domesticity. Amazingly both of them – the two had made chance contact at a concert a few years ago – turned up next to me in the Proms queue. We had a riotous reunion in the pub afterwards, reminiscing (one of them was the other ‘official’ of the Cambridge University Wagner Society apart from me) about the dinner we had with Friedlind Wagner (myfriend reminded me she clammed up when he asked her about what it was like growing up with Cosima, but, as I recall, was fairly open about her mother wanting to murder her), and a Wagner Society coach journey to see the first night of the Goodall Siegfried in April 1973, when someone hit the emergency button on the bus trying to demonstrate Siegfried splitting the anvil….Anyway, we have vowed to keep in touch