A corker of an evening at the Ally Pally
Despite its enduring association with the Royal Albert Hall, the BBC Proms has a long tradition of dipping into other arenas around London that offer contrasting atmospheres and environments: this year sees an excursion up north to Alexandra Palace.
Built by the same firm that constructed the Albert Hall, the Ally Pally has weathered over a century and a half all manner of conversions and humiliations – bombing and fires, as well as general collapse, damp and decay – to the point at which it seemed doomed to extinction. Fortunately, it was saved at the 11th hour after being turned into a charitable trust, and the blessed Heritage Lottery Fund has stepped in to kick-start a massive fundraising campaign that will see the site recover something of its former glory and popularity.
One of the Ally Pally’s many past tenants was the BBC, which made its first television broadcasts in 1936 from studios here. The corporation has long since departed, but will now visit as a guest to use the newly restored theatre on the site as one of its concert halls (Radio 2’s Friday Night is Music Night will be relayed here from December).
Its walls picturesquely decorated with plaster casts set in brickwork left in a fashionable state of raw distress, this space contains a two-tier auditorium accommodating about 1,300 in flexible seating. Graced with a sizeable stage and platform, a vividly resonant acoustic and spacious foyer, the Alexandra Palace Theatre looks set to be a popular addition to London’s musical scene.
The inaugural programme was fitting: 1875, the year Ally Pally opened, was also the year of the first performance of Trial by Jury, that 40-minute distillation of the genius of Gilbert and Sullivan’s partnership. Combining the topsy-turvy conceit of a thoroughly corrupt courtroom with Sullivan’s brilliant parodies of Handelian oratorio and Donizettian opera, it’s a sparkling gem of its period, lovingly polished up here in a corker of a performance conducted with crisp precision by Jane Glover.
Sam Furness and Mary Bevan were all youthful charm as the unhappy couple, under scrutiny from Neal Davies, Keel Watson and Ross Ramgobin as ludicrous representatives of Gilbert’s favourite target, the English judiciary. The BBC Singers gamely acted out their roles as the jurors in a lively if needlessly frenetic staging directed by Jack Furness, and everyone concerned had a very jolly time. G and S lives!
The first half of this matinee concert consisted of a potpourri of Victorian and Edwardian sweetmeats, not quite so full of beans. The BBC Concert Orchestra galumphed through the airy Mendelssohnian graces of Sullivan’s overture to Act IV of The Tempest, but came into its own in the more rumbustious opening to Ethel Smyth’s The Boatswain’s Mate, charged with her irresistibly stirring Suffragette anthem, The March of the Women.
A suite by Hubert Parry from a production of Aristophanes’s The Birds proved a protracted bore and a weedy aria from the musical comedy hit of 1892, Alfred Cellier’s The Mountebanks, prettily sung by Mary Bevan, left little impression. But there was one highlight: Onaway, Awake, Beloved from Samuel Coleridge-taylor’s cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, delivered by Sam Furness with a relish and ardour that recalled his great Welsh tenor predecessors and left me wondering whether it wasn’t time for a full professional revival of this once enormously popular cantata, composed by a half-creole native of Croydon who poignantly died in straitened circumstances before he had fulfilled his promise.