Tone set for an out of this world Proms season
The First Night has two important jobs to perform: to make a big splash, and to set the tone and signal the big themes of the coming season. The second half of this year’s First Night promised to do both, spectacularly.
It was a brand new piece named Five Telegrams, commissioned in commemoration of the end of the First World War, a major theme of the season. It was a big bold statement, involving two choirs as well as a BBC Symphony Orchestra heavily reinforced with extra trumpets of the BBC Proms Youth Ensemble, and moving imagery projected on to the curved walls and hanging mushrooms of the Albert Hall, below, by the co-creators of the piece, 59 Productions. The first half ’s message was harder to discern. The grimness of the First World War cast a shadow over it too, in the first movement of Holst’s The Planets, but only momentarily. Mostly it breathed a completely different air of otherworldly mystery and strenuous spiritual aspiration.
First came a last-minute addition to the programme, a brilliant orchestral curtain-raiser entitled Flourish with Fireworks, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra with the appropriate fleet-footed lightness under its chief conductor Sakari Oramo.
The piece was played in memory of composer Oliver Knussen, the gifted conductor and composer who sadly died last Sunday. Then came the spiritual uplift, in Vaughan Williams’s Toward the Unknown Country. “Durst thou now, O Soul, Walk out with me toward that unknown Region?” asked the choir with hushed timidity, and when the final chorus gave the jubilant affirmative answer, Oramo refused to let the tempo drag.
Overblown triumphalism is never his style, as was shown in the following performance of The Planets. The softness of Venus can seem altogether too soft after the nightmare visions of mechanised war in Mars, but Oramo kept the music’s pulse moving, and the big melody of Jupiter never dragged. Then we were brought back to Earth with a bump with Five Telegrams. The title is a reference to the various ways soldiers at the front were permitted to communicate, which were few and subject to strict censorship, or minced into coded form.
The visuals were mostly abstract, but here and there one caught a hint of something more concrete, a suggestion of maps and gun placements in one movement, a tangle of lines suggesting messages running down telephone wires to the front. Meredith’s musical idiom is a pop-flavoured minimalism with hints of Steve Reich, which doesn’t lend itself to lyrical effusion – an advantage in this piece, where feelings tend to be obliterated by the machinery of war.
Even so, one sometimes felt her usually buoyant inventiveness was hampered by the need to serve a symbolic purpose. As for the visuals, they were so beautifully decorative that one sometimes forgot their sinister implication. Nonetheless, this was a spectacular and brilliantly conceived start to the season.
Watch and hear this Prom for 30 days via the BBC Proms website. The Proms continues until Sept 8 and can be heard live on BBC Radio 3.