BBCSO
David Nice
So John Eliot Gardiner’s fire- and-air way with Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis turned out to be the last night of the Proms. Just as I was about to cycle to the Royal Albert Hall for the first of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s two Proms the following evening, a notice came through: following the news of the Queen’s death at 6pm, the evening’s event had been cancelled.In fact, for those who went – I now wish I had – there was “God Save the King” and “Nimrod” from Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, and then a respectful departure. It must have been a good way of coming-together – as a Last Night Read more ...
David Nice
Two quirky concertos – one for orchestra, though it might also be called a sinfonietta – and a big symphony: best of British but, more important, international and world class. Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra sounded glorious throughout from my seat – at 7 of the Albert Hall clock if the conductor is at 12 – but the eccentric charms of Mark-Anthony Turnage and Vaughan Williams fared better than the elusive soul of Elgar.There’s no doubt about it, Turnage’s Time Flies is a brilliant opener for any concert (and accomplished youth orchestras ought to give it a go). Co-commissioned by Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Russia meets Iceland: not the most obvious of juxtapositions. But the connection between the four composers featured in Prom 8 is to be found in their filmic approaches: the two contemporary Icelanders are both better known as media composers than in the concert hall, while Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky’s sweeping styles have inspired film composers since there have been film composers. But while the Russians wear their hearts on their sleeves, the Icelandic composers’ pieces were inscrutable, detached and demanding of a different kind of listening.Jóhann Jóhannsson, who died at the age of 48 Read more ...
David Nice
Any sensitive festival planner knows to begin the return to a new normal with something soft and elegiac – reflecting on all we’ve lost and mourned these past two years, as well as what we’re facing in the world now. Just over a fortnight ago, at the East Neuk Festival, the Elias Quartet led us gently by the hand with James MacMillan’s Memento. The 2022 BBC Proms began pianissimo, massed forces at the ready for the intermittent blazes of Verdi’s Requiem.It should have been a moving start to a Proms season which is rightly celebrating the big and the awe-inspiring. But those two years have Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s a far cry from his beginnings in a tight, no-frills power-pop-post-punk three piece, that’s for sure. Last May, Paul Weller took to the stage with guitarist Steve Craddock, a smattering of guest vocalists and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to perform a career retrospective with new arrangements by composer-conductor Jules Buckley.Career retrospective might be pushing it a bit, in fairness. The tracks here lean heavily into more recent releases such as True Meanings, On Sunset and Fat Pop, although there are pleasing nods to his time heading up The Jam and The Style Read more ...
David Nice
Did absence from Albert’s colosseum from early September 2019 until now and a roof-raising finale hoodwink many of us into thinking Dalia Stasevska’s interpretation of Sibelius’s Second Symphony among the greats? Having listened to it again on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer this morning, I'm convinced not; this was the real deal. Without that guarantee, a BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form would not have entrusted its second Finn – Stasevska is its Principal Guest Conductor – with the music of a composer (their composer) its Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo has already presented with unsurpassable Read more ...
David Nice
So the bubble of reactionary brouhaha over the Last Night of the Proms quickly burst: there can be no argument about singing “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Rule, Britannia!” when they’re to be presented in their original Proms forms (Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, where the tune preceded the words the composer so disliked, and Henry Wood’s 1905 Fantasia on British Sea Songs, all orchestral – only later did Malcolm Sargent rearrange the closing anthem to go with a solo voice). Apart from the death threats to conductor Dalia Stasevska and her family, what’s most lamentable is that Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Only a modest audience turned up for this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert, though it was unclear if this was caused by the threat of airborne disease or the inclusion of Schoenberg on the programme. The result was a paradoxical intimacy, with the huge orchestra expressing complex but private emotions from a group of fin de siècle Viennese composers. That intimacy was also a result of the music’s history, with the three of the four works originally for chamber groups, but here up-scaled to maximise impact.Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (originally for string sextet but played here in the composer Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The tough, knotty writing of the Missa solemnis – its “unrelenting integrity”, Donald Runnicles said in a pre-concert interview – was addressed unflinchingly last night by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. They have a distinguished history with the piece, having given memorable Proms performances with Sir Colin Davis and Bernard Haitink – and remembered now by a hissy tape transfer, Pierre Boulez to open the 1972 season. However, the burden of history and reputation was shaken off last night. Not with the iconoclastic severity or stripped-back sonorities redolent of period-instrument Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Jukka-Pekka Saraste doesn’t visit London much these days. He was Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and there were rumours that he was in line for the top job. That didn’t happen, and his career soon took him elsewhere – which was a great shame if last night's evening’s Shostakovich was anything to go by.Saraste is an enigmatic figure, relaxed on the podium and undemonstrative. His interpretations can lack punch, especially when compared to some of his more dynamic contemporaries, but he has a real feeling for mood, and for subtly developing the music’s perspective over Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can see the temptation. With three different versions and four different overtures to choose from, as well as all that spoken dialogue to cut, substitute or omit, Beethoven’s Fidelio has always been a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of opera – a work, like Hamlet, that we shape and reshape in our own image. With so much agency available, so many fissures and footholds in this troubled piece, perhaps it was inevitable that someone would go all the way, jettison the score entirely and start from scratch.This is exactly what Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang has done. His prisoner of Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
“Hieronymus!” bellowed David Wilson Johnson from the Barbican Hall’s circle on Saturday evening. “Hieronymus Bosch!” Commissioned by Dutch radio for a big piece to mark 500 years since the passing of the Dutch painter in 1516, the German composer Detlev Glanert wrote a Requiem. There is a precedent for his grand design in the War Requiem of Britten, where poems of Wilfred Owen are interleaved with the text of the Requiem Mass. Glanert alighted on the Seven Deadly Sins, as described in the medieval collection of Carmina burana on which Orff drew for his barnstorming, perennially popular Read more ...