Royal beast tamed by the piano whisperer
‘Ialmost feel the piano is even more excited than we are,” said Stephen Hough on Radio 4. Insofar as an inanimate assembly of wood and metal can get excited, this was justified. It was the piano’s big day. Queen Victoria’s spangly gold Erard had been let out of its padded cell in Buckingham Palace and set free in the Royal Albert Hall to perform with an
orchestra for the very first time in its 163-year history.
It sounded as you might expect of a creature that had been locked indoors for that long: a touch overawed, hoarse, feral. With the wrong pianist it might have gone horribly wrong. But in Hough you have one of the great piano whisperers. Riding the piano’s gruff sound thrillingly in the outer movements of Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto, Hough managed to still it beautifully for the slow movement, where he lingered and dawdled, revelling in the instrument’s woody tones. Given that the piano was a tool of love, a device on which Victoria and Albert would woo each other in private, it sounded even happier in the hypnotic intimacy of Hough’s solo encore, Chopin’s Nocturne Op 9 No 2.
The Prom was celebrating the 200th anniversary of Victoria’s birth. But it also felt like a sly challenge to that infamous slur on 19th-century British music-making that this was a “land without music”. The opening gambit, however, felt risky. Arthur Sullivan’s “patriotic ballet” Victoria and Merrie England Suite (1897) is the lightest of light music, the classical equivalent of a Sherbet dip. Yet Adam Fischer and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment showed how far a bit of care and belief can go.
Tenderness and fervour transformed the opening berceuse into something quite glorious, almost profound. And while no orchestra could fully de-twee the Mistletoe Dance, there were shades of Dvořák elsewhere and moments where one thought, this is no worse than Rossini.
The night’s real lesson was how much more of a “land without music” we would have been without the Royal family. Bach’s St Matthew Passion arrived here only thanks to Albert. And if it wasn’t for the couple’s friendship with Mendelssohn, would he have performed as much in Britain? Or hung around for long enough to immortalise Fingal’s Cave?
Mendelssohn improvised for the royals, duetted with them, arranged songs for them. He was impressed by their playing but, diplomatically, kept shtum about Prince Albert’s own compositional skills. We sampled five of Albert’s neat little songs, and Hough and tenor Alessandro Fisher gave it their best shot. As befits royal work, this was music that didn’t even remotely want to get its hands dirty.
It’s odd that the couple never commissioned Mendelssohn. The Scottish Symphony was dedicated to Victoria, however, lucky woman. The OAE’S performance was invigoratingly blustery with salty horns, a woodwind section barely out of the barnyard and timp attacks that struck like thunderbolts. Fischer let it all run deliciously amok, and then led us out of the mayhem into that glorious golden sunburst of an ending like a delirious shepherd.
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