Fifty years after Apollo 11, the Proms put a man on the Moog
1969: The Sound of a Summer Royal Albert Hall, London ★★☆☆☆
It was billed as a concert to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. But, frankly, Prom 11 was a bit of a disaster, firing a few rockets but never getting off the ground.
The whole thing was lumbered with an essentially spurious concept: celebrating the sounds of 1969 by playing light orchestral versions of pop hits and movie soundtracks. And if that’s not spacey enough for you, how about inviting electronic vintage synthesizer outfit the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble to add some sci-fi sounds? It reeked of a marketing brainstorm that should have been left on the back of an envelope.
In fact, the synthesizer-orchestra collaboration on Gregory’s Journey
into the Sky was the most interesting thing that happened all night, although any connection to 1969 was specious. The piece was composed in 2010 as the basis of an opera, Piccard
in Space, about Auguste Piccard, the Swiss physicist who in 1931 ascended into the stratosphere by hydrogen balloon. Well, that’s quite close to the Moon, isn’t it?
Gregory is one half of electro dance duo Goldfrapp. His Moog Ensemble is a side project exploring early analogue synthesizers. He was invited to celebrate Switched-on Bach, Wendy Carlos’s groundbreaking synth album (actually released in 1968). Performing an excerpt from Brandenburg Concerto
No. 3 with the BBC Concert Orchestra proved a pointless exercise, however, with strings all but drowning out the weird sounds that made the Moog the space-age instrument of its era.
Journey into the Sky was far more intriguing, composed as an integrated piece with orchestra, and demonstrating how exciting it can be to blend other-worldly electronic sounds with traditional instruments. I would have happily listened to a whole concert built around this instrumental space race. But perhaps it was considered too far out for an essentially crowd-pleasing pop Prom.
Curation was the real issue. If you think of 1969 in music, you might consider how the hippy promise of Woodstock was dampened by the hellishness of the Rolling Stones at Altamont, the rise of heavy rock (Hendrix, Cream, Led Zeppelin), the birth of the rock opera (The Who’s Tommy and the musical Hair) and the swan song of The Beatles with Abbey Road. I am not sure many people would be thinking about Michel
The strings all but drowned out the weird sounds that made the Moog the spaceage instrument of its era
Legrand’s ballad What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life from the forgotten film The Happy Ending.
It felt as though someone had gone through the BBC Concert Orchestra’s book of arrangements and thought: “Well, we could squeeze that one in.” Song selection was skewed towards easy listening, with movie themes by Burt Bacharach and Quincy Jones sung with jazzy soul by Vanessa Haynes and Tony Momrelle. The Beatles were represented by undemanding sashays through Get Back and Here Comes the Sun, with only David Arnold’s arrangement of Something exploring depths that other renditions simply glided over. We were served up cocktail-lounge versions of the Marvin Gaye hit I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Aretha Franklin anthem Say a Little Prayer, neither of which was written or released in 1969.
It was left to Lemn Sissay, the amiable Lancashire poet, to justify these odd choices, associating Gaye and Franklin with the US civil rights movement. We should be indebted to Sissay for correcting a lifelong mispronunciation of Moog. It actually rhymes with “vogue”, apparently.
It wasn’t until an uncredited encore that Prom 11 got close to achieving lift off, when the BBC orchestra and Moog Ensemble collaborated on a rich, strange version of the greatest space-themed hit of 1969 and perhaps ever: David Bowie’s Space Oddity. It was a gorgeous finale, but Ground Control should have aborted this mission at the planning stage.
This concert is available for 30 days on the BBC iplayer. The Proms continue until Sept 14. Tickets: 020 7070 4441