The memories are good but European elephant in the room can’t be ignored
Last Night of the Proms Royal Albert Hall
As always the Proms have passed by in a whirl, leaving behind some vivid memories. The most overwhelming concert in the season was surely Simon Rattle leading the London Symphony Orchestra in Schoenberg’s vast romantic saga
Gurrelieder. At the opposite pole were tiny intimate moments in Pavel Kolesnikov’s wonderful Chopin recital at Cadogan Hall. True, there were some turkeys along the way. There must be a special place in purgatory where pieces as pretentiously empty as Pascal Dusapin’s Outscape are sent, to be washed clean of their sins.
But mostly the memories are good: Renée Fleming revealing all the tender nostalgia of Samuel Barber’s Knoxville:
Summer of 1915; Semyon Bychkov’s taut shaping of Mussorgsky’s opera
Khovanshchina; the rapt intensity of Cassandra Miller’s recreation of a southern hymn, in the dim rotunda of
The Tanks at Tate Modern. And who could forget tenor Allan Clayton in Gerald Barry’s absurdist Canada?
This Last Night was among the stronger ones of recent years. The brand new curtain-raiser from Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski had the strange title Flounce, which didn’t arouse the highest expectations, but fortunately the piece itself wasn’t flouncy or flirty.
Just as deft and surprising was the curtain-raiser to the second half, a foretaste from John Adams of his forthcoming opera Girls of the Golden
West which portrayed the famous
Spider Dance of Lola Montez. These weren’t the only discoveries. Malcolm Sargent’s Impressions of a Windy Day proved the famed conductor could have had a great career as a light music composer, and Sibelius’s Finlandia hymn – performed by the combined forces of the BBC singers, chorus and orchestra as a nod to the centenary of Finland’s independence – provided the most thrilling moment of the evening.
Most substantial of the pieces that were new to the Proms was the
Budavári Te Deum, a setting of the familiar sacred text by one of Hungary’s finest composers, Zoltán Kodály. It was full of joyous choral outbursts, and movingly intricate “ecclesiastical” counterpoint for the four soloists, among whom mezzosoprano Christine Rice stood out.
Wagnerian soprano Nina Stemme hasn’t been having a good summer – she cancelled a string of dates at the Salzburg Festival – and her entry at the beginning of the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde was tentative and oddly husky. But eventually her voice recovered its bloom, and the ending was as radiant as it should be.
Later she gamely sang some Kurt Weill songs and appeared with mock-wagnerian helmet and spear, for Rule Britannia. By then we were well into Last Night jollifications. But there was an oddity about the occasion which all the singing and balloons couldn’t hide. Given that London had witnessed a pro-eu demonstration during the day, and the hall itself was full of EU flags and Union Jacks (often clutched in the same hand), was this not the moment for Sakari Oramo to ditch his bland speech about conductors and wax eloquent about the way classical music embodies a European culture of which Britain will always be a part, however the Brexit drama plays out? Presumably he was under strict instructions from the BBC not to be political, but the elephant in the room was just too big to ignore.
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