Royal Albert Hall
Sebastian Scotney
If only the Last Night of the Proms could just be about the music. If it were, then the story which I would want to tell would be about Janine Jansen. A crowd which mainly turns up to wave its vast array of flags, to bounce its beach-balls and generally to step free from the shackles of adulthood, was mesmerised into a concentrated hush by the magnetism of the Dutch violinist. She drew the huge audience right in to her playing. She made the cavernous Royal Albert Hall feel like an intimate space. She tamed the crowd and (almost, briefly) silenced the bronchially challenged.But the Last Night Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The silliness of the Last Night is really just a postscript to the penultimate night of the Proms, traditionally given over to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was a tradition restored yesterday evening when Alan Gilbert and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra returned for their second concert of the season. For anyone whose stomach is liable to turn at extrovert jingoism and excess, this was the perfect antidote.Febrile and urgent under Chailly, the orchestra found rather different colours in Beethoven’s final symphony for Gilbert – cooler, quieter, more understated. I’ve never Read more ...
David Nice
Swathes of this year’s final Late Night Prom were so invertebrate, amateurish even, that I was tempted to go home and throw out my Want One and Want Two CDs. I won’t, of course: Canadian American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has written some fabulous songs, and developed a unique vocal style to deliver them. But if the act of “hammering out a tune” is, as he puts it, "cosmic", as, very often, are the results, last night’s performance was aquatic, and not in a good way. Swimming around in front of an over-amplified orchestra – a much-expanded Britten Sinfonia conducted by Canadian Opera Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A Prom billed as “English Music” sounds like a restful sort of affair – probably pastoral, definitely tuneful and potentially restorative after a day in the office. In practice however this concert from Andrew Litton and the BBC Symphony Orchestra was – thankfully – altogether more bracing, pairing Vaughan Williams at his most combative with vintage Birtwistle.Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Greensleeves felt like the sugar to help the musical medicine go down – a pacifying opener to reassure anyone nervous about the half hour of Birtwistle to come. Litton underplayed it exquisitely, coaxing a Read more ...
geoff brown
Is there something about the start of a new cultural season, or indeed the Proms, that make classical music’s conductors rush to jump ship? Consider this. Last Friday, two days before his pair of Prom concerts with his American outfit, the Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, so diffident on the outside, resigned from his important European post as the Vienna State Opera’s music director with immediate effect. Irreconcilable artistic differences were cited. Then on Monday morning, the day after fronting the patchily effective Proms debut of Qatar’s multi-national, peace-loving trophy Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Peter Sellars’ work used to be about making a statement. He would dislocate texts from contexts, subvert musical suggestion and ignore written statement for the sheer joy of the artistic friction it would generate. The beauty of his St Matthew Passion staging however, first seen in 2010, is that it does nothing of the sort.By the end of three hours of delicate, interpersonal drama and choric tableaux, Sellars has made no statement at all, and that refusal, that restraint, allows Bach’s music to speak louder than any amount of “konzept”. Of course Sellars is not alone in this. Jonathan Miller’ Read more ...
David Nice
After Monday’s Respighi extravaganza at the Proms, it was back on the rainbow express for more wonders of orchestral colour last night. In the young Stravinsky’s large-scale signing-in and poor depressed old Rachmaninov’s signing-off, you could trust Sir Simon Rattle’s Berlin army of generals to turn in any amount of subtle colours.It seems fair to launch by praising Stefan Dohr’s first horn and the cor anglais of Dominik Wollenweber as the respective signature tones of The Firebird and the Symphonic Dances. But while I’ve spent an obsessive interim period of listening to confirm Respighi has Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Conductor Marin Alsop was welcomed like Britannia herself at last night’s concert, an astute partnership of John Adams’ vivacious hybridism and Gustav Mahler’s colourful patchwork quilt of a symphony. Alsop won the Prommers’ hearts with her successful navigation through the choppy waters of last year’s Last Night, but the ecstatic ovation greeting the conclusion of this performance was for something quite different: she directed the BBC Symphony Orchestra in lean, energetic and for the most part precise accounts of seemingly very different works, which she juxtaposed intelligently.John Adams Read more ...
David Nice
After the enervating excesses of Salome and Elektra at the weekend, the abundance of notes at the Proms continued in a piano recital and an orchestral showstopper, but this time with built-in air conditioning. After all, both 22-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor and septuagenarian Charles Dutoit are absolutely in control of the colours they make, very occasionally too much so. But it was a rainbow-hued day inside the Cadogan and Royal Albert Halls, culminating in a spectacular and perhaps unrepeatable Respighi triple bill of Roman impressions.The Grosvenor happening (***) was a first in several Read more ...
edward.seckerson
How much familial dysfunction and lust - whether for sexual gratification or revenge - can one take in a single weekend? Salome and Elektra back-to back may on paper seem like a feast of divine decadence but no sooner had one become accustomed to the sickly sweet air of the former when the putrefaction of the latter (I always think that Strauss’ orchestra is in the final stages of decay with Elektra) filled one’s nostrils - and ears. Then there was the little matter of inevitable comparisons, of Salome - with Stemme, Runnicles and his fabulous Deutsche Oper Berlin Orchestra - being one of the Read more ...
David Nice
So here’s where I join the ranks of Old Opera Bores by declaring this Salome, Nina Stemme, the best I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens in 1978, and this Salome as in Richard Strauss’s Wilde opera from Donald Runnicles and his Deutsche Oper Berlin ensemble categorically the most near-perfect. It’s also the first time I’ve had a group of very loud, rude people behind me shouting “sit down” when I stood at the end (and John the Baptist’s God knows I don’t do that often). To which the only answers were “stand up yourselves” and “what does it take?” Most of the arena stalls eventually followed suit Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
About 10 minutes into the Brahms Third Symphony I wanted to check a name in the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s programme. I dared to turn a page. Bad idea. Such preternatural stillness had settled over the sold-out Royal Albert Hall that the gesture could probably have been spotted from the balcony. A motionless, virtually breathless audience is a rarity even at the Proms, where quality of listening is venerated; still, to hold around 6000 people quite so rapt with attention is an extraordinary skill in orchestra and conductor. But then, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer are no Read more ...