Englishness to the fore at the Proms
BBC Symphony Orchestra Royal Albert Hall
In every Proms season there are moments when the Englishness of the institution – the “let’s-pretend-we’re-not-serious” jollity of those indefatigable Prommers – is amplified by the Englishness of the music. This was such a moment. The BBC SO and Chorus under its one-time chief conductor Sir Andrew Davis, offered a classic example of English transcendentalism, in the shape of Vaughan Williams’s Toward the Unknown Region, and a new piece from Anthony Payne, who turns 80 this year.
Of Land, Sea and Sky is Payne’s first piece for chorus and orchestra, and it’s based on a long poem of his own, packed full of the natural imagery he loves. There is the sea in its angriest mood, the thunderous movement of horse’s hooves (an image inspired by the white horses of the Camargue as they race across the mud-flats of the Rhône estuary), the massing of clouds, the landscape of the Somme, as caught in a painting from 1916.
Lurking behind these is the feeling for the infinite that steals into our souls, when we see cloud and sky merge at the horizon.
The music this text evoked could have been so rich, and occasionally it really was. A gruff recurring rhythm in the bass was like a distant stampede. The muted trumpets in the ‘Clouds over Somme Valley’ reminded us of the Great War. The busyness of the woodwinds against rocking harmonies and incandescent string chords was something like a sea-scape; a rocking boat here, a cliff-face there, clouds scudding overhead. Unfortunately, the piece often fell victim to Payne’s good intentions. He was so concerned to fashion cunning links between everything that the separate movements tended to blur together, and the musical ideas rarely jumped into focus.
Tchaikovsky’s Tempest Overture, which launched the concert, had a similar generic quality. All Tchaikovsky fingerprints could be discerned in the music, but not his genius, despite the fervent performance. In Bruch’s evergreen Violin Concerto the problem was the young Taiwanese-Australian virtuoso Ray Chen. He is a fabulous player of huge charm, as was shown in the encore he played, Paganini’s showily difficult 21st Caprice. But his playing was too flamboyantly wayward and his vibrato too operatically intense, to capture the grave and tender aspect of Bruch’s masterpiece. Only at the end, in Vaughan Williams’s Toward the Unknown Region, did we get a truly satisfying marriage of a masterly piece of music, and a performance of rapturous intensity.