Superb concert revisits horrors of the trenches

Proms Youth Choir Royal Albert Hall Proms at Roundhouse

Saturday’s Prom contained many good things, beginning with a touchingly radiant new piece from Ēriks Ešenvalds on a Longfellow poem. Its message that we should have faith in the latest generation was given an apt fervency by the BBC Proms Youth Choir. They lent that same quality to Beethoven’s Ninth from the World Orchestra for Peace, conducted by Donald Runnicles. The soloists weren’t distinguished, but the superb playing and choir more than made up for them.

However, it was the afternoon Prom at the Roundhouse from the London Sinfonietta under conductor George Benjamin that really hit the bullseye. It began with Charles Ives’s The

Unanswered Question, its question

from the trumpet sounding forlorn, given that all the music that followed related to the centenary of 1918. Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments was closest in time, but musically was the most distant. It unfolded as an austere ritual that moved from stoniness to radiance.

By contrast, the four new pieces commissioned to mark the centenary all seemed to be mired in the horror of the trenches. Among the three vocal numbers brilliantly sung by Susan Bickley was Georg Friedrich Haas’s setting of a conversation between two Army doctors, which caught their alarm at their growing callousness and their desire to hang on to their humanity.

Pieces by Isabel Mundry and Luca Francesconi suggested a stunned, shellshocked world in which feeling can barely survive. Hannah Kendall’s

Verdana had a strikingly original form which began in fear and excitement, withdrew to uneasy calm, and returned to panic.

Oliver Messiaen’s Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum drowned the maelstrom of conflicting feelings in apocalyptic brass and gongs, evoking an eternity beyond earthly strife.

Hear these Proms for 30 days via the BBC website. The Proms continue until Sept 8. Hear them all on BBC Radio 3, or download the Proms on your mobile or tablet via the BBC iplayer Radio app