Proms
theartsdesk
The concert photographer Chris Christodoulou has been taking pictures at the BBC Proms for 35 years. Even more than the musicians under their baton, he spends his time watching conductors like a hawk, observing their every gesture and grimace. Every year the wackier images, which convey less dignity but more truth, don’t make it into the public eye.Or they didn’t until we at The Arts Desk entered into collaboration with Christodoulou. This year we publish our seventh gallery of his action portraits. Normally we publish only one snap per conductor. This time round, to help the Proms along with Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I had never been to the Last Night of the Proms until last night, nor really paid much attention to it in recent years. To the extent I did, I have been resentful of the fact that to many people it represents the Proms as a whole, with its flag waving and fancy dress, although in fact it is utterly atypical. But I went in the spirit of trying anything once and I’m glad I did, although once is probably enough.In a way, critiquing the Last Night of the Proms makes as much sense as critiquing a children’s birthday party, and is as likely to end in tears. The Last Night does not function like a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Tradition – a choral spectacular for the penultimate night of the Proms – but with a twist – a youth choir and period instruments. Marin Alsop this evening led a spectacular Verdi Requiem, not least for the sheer scale of the chorus, the BBC Proms Youth Choir some 200 strong. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment provided chacterful accompaniment, though sometimes struggled to compete, and the four soloists all delivered, particularly Tamara Wilson, here confirming her reputation as one of today’s leading Verdi sopranos.The BBC Proms Youth Choir brings together four youth choruses from Read more ...
David Nice
Soft power in the shape of cultural ambassadors can go a long way. With a little help from its big guns in banking and industry, Germany has given this year's Proms no less than four of its major orchestras – from Leipzig, two from Berlin, and now from Dresden: all the more reason to wave those EU flags on a typically international Last Night in three days' time.There's even been co-ordination this week in the shape of Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies three nights running, first from Barenboim and now from Christian Thielemann. A failsafe interpreter of the Austro-German Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Daniel Barenboim is as distinctive as he is unpredictable. His considerable strengths – dynamism, passion, keen intellectual engagement – are balanced by some notable weaknesses – clunky tempo changes, lack of detail – but all configure differently in each performance. This Prom was a success largely for the fresh perspectives he brought to Mozart and Bruckner, both composers prone to stiffness and formality from less adventurous performers.If the Mozart was the less successful, it was because Barenboim seemed to take his ideas too far, always working just outside the bounds of classical Read more ...
David Nice
Gone, it seems, is the era of epic three-part Proms. Sunday afternoon's programme, partly billed as a children's hour, might have pleased pianist and pundit Stephen Hough, whose recent broadsheet plea for shorter concerts somewhat overdid the need (lunchtime events already cater to concertgoers in a hurry very well, and the Proms has its late-nighters too). But it left many of us wanting more, not just of Ravel in the second half but also of the distinctive Simón Bolívar earthiness, which was given free rein only in one spirited encore. Subtlety, for the most part, was the real name of Read more ...
David Nice
What do Boulez's Éclat, for 15 instruments, and Mahler's Seventh Symphony, for over 100, have in common? Most obviously, guitar and mandolin, symbols of a wider interest in unusual sonorities. But while Boulez aims, as often, for needle point precision, Mahler uses selective groups, at least up to his finale when he exuberantly exchanges night for day, to create peculiar and unsettling grades of chiaroscuro. No one has ever gone, or is ever likely to go, deeper in the creation of subtle perspectives than Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.There's plenty of éclat, in the usual sense Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Californian saxophone phenomenon Kamasi Washington is never knowingly understated. He rocked up for his Proms debut on Tuesday night having led a vast musical entourage on tour across Europe all summer, and delivered an ecstatic, if occasionally verbose, statement of intent. There were problems with both the performance and one or two of the compositions. But as a live experience, it was, in places, euphoric. Only a determined curmudgeon could leave without a grin.We were treated to some highlights of last year’s album The Epic. The title doesn’t disappoint, in terms of ambition, at least. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Branding, as any marketing manager will tell you, is everything when it comes to selling, and when it comes to selling, classical music is no different from cars, cornflakes or shampoo. It explains why a Mahler orchestral song-cycle would fill the Royal Albert Hall while a similar work by his love-rival and near-contemporary Alexander von Zemlinsky last night left it half empty.Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony is a seven-movement orchestral song-cycle with echoes (as Matthew Rye’s programme note reminded us) not only of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, but also Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. A dialogue Read more ...
David Nice
There is no reason why young musicians shouldn't make something special out of mature thoughts on mortality. Nor is the Albert Hall problematic when it comes to haloing intimate Bach as finely as it does massive Bruckner. The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra glowed in both the large scale and the small last night. Any shortcomings were in senior hands and hearts - possibly those of a usually great conductor, Philippe Jordan, more likely the infirm purpose of his composer, Bruckner. The most surprising disappointment of all came from that most prized of baritones, Christian Gerhaher.First, though Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
If you go down to the woods today, to be sure of a big surprise is a contradiction in terms, but this pair of sylvan adventures by Matthias Pintscher and Mendelssohn was another example of the discreetly sensitive programme-building which has distinguished the present season of BBC Proms.Cello concertos have been a theme. Two in the last week alone (from Charlotte Bray and Colin Matthews) alongside classics by Elgar (at the First Night) and Haydn, played in yesterday’s matinee Prom by Narek Hakhnazaryan and the Ulster Orchestra. Pintscher's Reflections on Narcissus falls between them: written Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Some enchanted afternoon in Camden Town… the Proms returned to the Roundhouse after four decades with a dreamlike fusion of sound, space and light. Ron Arad’s Curtain Call – a 360° installation of 5,600 sillicon rods – encircled the London Sinfonietta and audience in its luminescent embrace, a haze of microtonal music slinking through a sequence of glimmering projections.The programme built towards György Ligeti’s Ramifications, an indelible masterpiece of the gauziest microtonal weave, and part-inspiration for Georg Friedrich Haas’s Open Spaces II (2007). In this ravishing work Haas also Read more ...