Proms
alexandra.coghlan
We’ve had more than our fair share of Beethoven symphonies in London recently. But with the Proms’s monolithic Daniel Barenboim cycle now midway through, memories of Riccardo Chailly and John Eliot Gardiner are being steadily blotted out. Gone are the frisky tempos, the lightness of touch, and in their place we’re being reintroduced to Beethoven the heavyweight. There’s majesty here certainly, and occasional moments of compelling originality, but also a fair amount of frustration.The first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No 6 may be marked “Allegro non troppo”, but the composer’s in-built Read more ...
charlotte.gardner
Last night's concert performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens was not a Prom for the fainthearted. After all, if sitting through a five-hour opera had been a daunting undertaking for the Covent Garden audiences last month - who could also enjoy David McVicar's eye-catching staging - then it was inevitable that anyone seated in the Royal Albert Hall for the visually pared-down version was expecting to feel very culturally virtuous by the end of the night. With its Trojan horses, ballets and massive crowd scenes, this grand five-act opera based on the fall of Troy and establishment of Rome is both Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Last night was meant to be a celebration of Beethoven and Barenboim. But we had a gatecrasher. And at the opening concert of the first cycle of the Beethoven symphonies at the Proms for 60 years, the name on everyone's lips was neither Beethoven nor Daniel Barenboim, but that of Pierre Boulez. Though modest in its manner of musical expression, the near 50 minutes of continuous music that make up Boulez's chamber work Dérive 2 dwarfed the two Beethoven symphonies that stood either side of it and dominated the tone of evening. There was bafflement from some in the audience, wide-eyed Read more ...
geoff brown
One top student orchestra playing on its own can be exciting enough. Two playing together can produce a charge of dynamite that might not leave the building standing. That was so anyway in last night’s Prom, when players from New York City’s Juilliard School and London’s Royal Academy of Music, by now frequent collaborators, joined up to shake the earth with thunderous brass, swooning strings, diamond precision, a velvet bloom – every characteristic of a world-class orchestra except the honour of being conducted by Lorin Maazel.Instead the podium was occupied by America’s favourite composer, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
How silly an armchair looks in the Royal Albert Hall - like a rubber duck floating in the Pacific. Yet how right it was for those behind this excellent semi- staged Proms performance of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande to try to recreate a bit of fin-de-siècle intimacy for this most intensely intimate of operas. And how appropriate also for there to be a couch on stage in a work that is, and has always been, a psychoanalyst's dream.But it wasn't just the furniture that suggested that we were being given entry to an interior world. Everything about the way this symbolist drama played Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Let a woman in your life," roars Professor Henry Higgins, “and your serenity is through. She'll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome and then go on to the enthralling task of overhauling you.” It’s a scenario not unlike letting the winsome darling that is musical theatre loose among the club armchairs and smoking jackets of a classical music festival.The dome of the Royal Albert Hall may have been safe from a substantial redesign, but last night the lights glowed hot pink and the stage teemed with more action than a whole cycle of Beethoven symphonies. John Wilson and his Read more ...
geoff brown
Two weeks to go to the Olympics, of course, but the Proms Olympics – 84 concerts in 60 days – have already taken off, with Britain placed first, second, third and fourth. For last night’s First Night concert was one where everything except Canadian singer Gerald Finley was British: the composers, the conductors (all four of them), the orchestra, certainly the weather.There was also something distinctly British about the concert’s failure to be unquenchably festive. The best of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s playing, and some of the BBC Symphony Chorus’s most ravishing sounds, went into Delius’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
The greatest music festival of them is once more upon us. Throughout our extensive coverage of last year's BBC Proms, we featured the remarkable work of photographer Chris Christodoulou. We have asked Chris to select his favourite pictures of conductors at work, and we present them again for your entertainment and enlightenment as the world's greatest conductors again take to the podium for the summer to show exactly what it takes to do what they do.The portraits find the maestri of the podium displaying the full range of communicative emotions - commanding, pleading, imperious, plaintive. Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born in Beckenham, Kent, in 1960, Django Bates is a self-taught composer and founder member of the seminal big band Loose Tubes (1983-1990). As well as leading his own groups, Human Chain and Delightful Precipice, he has composed works for the Brodsky Quartet, Joanna MacGregor, Evelyn Glennie, the Britten Sinfonia and the Dutch Metropole Orchestra, amongst others. In 1997, Bates was awarded the prestigious Jazzpar prize, known as the 'Nobel Prize of Jazz' (previous recipients include Lee Konitz, Roy Haynes and Geri Allen). He currently teaches at Bern University of the Arts and the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The 2012 BBC Proms open on 13 July and end on 8 September. This is the full list of the 76 concerts. Book tickets here. Prom 1: First Night of the PromsFri 13 July 2012, 7.30pm, Royal Albert HallMark-Anthony Turnage - Canon Fever (3 mins)Elgar - Overture 'Cockaigne (In London Town)' (15 mins)Delius - Sea Drift (25 mins)Tippett - Suite for the Birthday of Prince Charles (16 mins)Elgar - Coronation Ode (33 mins)Prom 2: Lerner & Loewe – My Fair LadySat 14 July 2012, 7.00pm, Royal Albert HallLoewe - My Fair Lady (170 mins)Prom 3: Debussy – Pelléas et MélisandeSun 15 July 2012, 7.00pm, Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Havergal Brian: Symphony No 1 The Gothic BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Concert Orchestra etc/Martyn Brabbins (Hyperion)The performers involved are too numerous to list above; Hyperion do include the names of every instrumentalist, soloist and choir member in the booklet, more than 800 of them. This is a recording of the 2011 Proms performance, recorded with spectacular definition by the BBC on 17 July last year. Where to begin? This is a hugely impressive record of a great performance, but I’m not convinced that this is great music. But you can’t help feeling thankful Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...