Mixing fun and intelligence is a triumph
Proms 2016 Ten Pieces II Royal Albert Hall ★★★★★
Selling classical music to secondary school children – now there’s a challenge. Were the vibes from the kids and mums and dads at the Ten Pieces Prom going to be positive? On the way in, among the excitable crowds, I made a quick canvass of opinion. “I love classical music,” opined one pert girl of about 11. “It makes me go to sleep.” Her younger brother pulled a face. “I hate classical music,” he said, as his father smiled faintly with embarrassment.
Clearly it wasn’t going to be plain sailing. The BBC did a tremendous job with the first Ten Pieces project, designed for primary school children, but that was an easier job. Children of that age are open to anything, and willing to be led. But secondary school children know what they like, and tend to assume a fashionably bored pose when faced with anything uncool. Which is why the BBC played safe with the second list of Ten Pieces, designed especially for them. I have remarked before in The Telegraph that you could swap the two lists round, without raising an eyebrow.
So I approached this Prom with a certain trepidation. It promised us all Ten Pieces alongside numerous spinoff music and dance items specially composed and performed by schoolchildren from all over Britain. I imagined it would be like so many other children’s Proms I’ve seen: well-meaning, done with huge professionalism and slickness, but hyperactive and relentlessly cheery.
In fact it was a wonderful show, which was indeed full of spectacle and razzmatazz. It reminded us of the vast resources the BBC can command. There were so many screens, containing some really slick animation, so many gyrating light beams cutting through the dry ice, that one could be easily overwhelmed. Here and there the show fell into the familiar trap of sensory overload, as in the performance (given, like all the pieces, by the superbly drilled BBC Philharmonic under Alpesh Chauhan) of the panic-stricken scherzo from Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony. An expressive, disciplined bunch of dancers from Wildern School in Southampton were great, and it was good to see an animated film evoking the horrors of Stalinism. But why have both together? The result was we could focus on neither.
It was a shame because the piece was set up by Lemn Sissay (the best of the team of presenters) in a way which pulled no punches about Shostakovich’s probable state of mind when he wrote it. What a huge step forward this was from the last time the piece was included in a children’s Prom, when it was set up as a jolly romp. Later, Sissay calmed everyone and evoked the song of a skylark above our heads, before a group of actors from Bangor Grammar School in Northern Ireland presented some letters home from First World War soldiers, in full battledress. As a way of setting us up for Vaughan Williams’s
The Lark Ascending, played with rhapsodic tenderness by violinist Esther Yoo, this was perfect.
These were the serious moments; the fun-and-games ones were equally clever, in the way they smuggled in education in the guise of a running gag. One featured a Joseph Haydn figure in full wig-and-buckles regalia, who came on to introduce his own trumpet concerto, and then wouldn’t go away. Another was a recurring breathless news commentary on the screens, from Newsround presenter Leah Boleto, about a rash of golden rings seen across London. This allowed the story of Wagner’s Ring, and in particular the Ride of the
Valkyries, to be slipped in piece by piece, rather than as one indigestible gobbet of information. So often in shows of this kind, sensitivity and intelligence – not to mention musical values – are drowned out by the arsenal of technology, and the logistics of running such a complex event. Here everything worked beautifully together, in a show that could fairly be called a triumph.