Tribute to the Bard fails to ignite

Shakespeare on Stage and Screen Royal Albert Hall ★★★★★

As this year is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the 44th Prom was a tribute to the poet’s influence on music. And what an influence – on Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Mendelssohn, Verdi, to name but a few.

Some kind of organising principle was needed, and the American Keith Lockhart, principal conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra, came up with what looked like a beguiling plan. Here he led the orchestra in a miscellany of popular British and American works held together by the glue of Shakespeare.

The first half was British, with arrangements of William Walton’s film scores for Laurence Olivier’s

Richard III and As You Like It, with rarely performed gems by Gerald Finzi (Love’s Labour’s Lost excerpts, 1946) and Arthur Sullivan (The Tempest – Overture to Act 4, 1861) and the

Springtime Dance by Joby Talbot from the Royal Ballet’s 2014 take on The Winter’s Tale.

The Brits, it has to be said, came over as just a bit square, and it was only when Lockhart launched into Talbot’s hoe-down in The Winter’s Tale that a whiff of Shakespeare’s bad-boy sexuality hit the senses. It promised much for the second half, which

took us across the pond to revisit Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, and Richard Rodgers’ The Boys from Syracuse.

But this never quite came alight. The Bernstein lacked bite (though made up for it somewhat with a neck-tingling rendition of the Somewhere theme); the Porter and Rodgers were short of drama; and, Hannah Waddingham apart, the singers and witty words were drowned by the orchestra. It left me longing to be in the cinema hearing Walton’s music with the films, or in the theatre watching West Side Story and Kiss Me, Kate – which is, of course, both the point and the shortcoming of such a concert performance.