A Prom that was rather cruel to Saint-saëns’s animals
Proms The Carnival of the Animals Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 ★★★★★
On paper, this childfriendly Prom was a tantalising family affair. The Kanneh-masons are Britain’s first musical family, thrust into the spotlight three years ago when the then 19-year-old cellist Sheku almost stole the show from Harry and Meghan at their own wedding. The family are now known for having produced not just one ridiculously talented musician but seven, and each one, alongside seven further musicians, was on stage for this centenary performance of
Saint-saëns’s evergreen zoological fantasia, having recorded it with brightly coloured vigour alongside Michael Morpurgo for Decca last year. All the greater pity then that, through no fault of their own, the Kannehmasons struggled to dominate their own event.
Family Proms are always a little bit chaotic, if charmingly so. But you can hardly blame young legs in the audience for becoming prematurely restless when they’ve been subjected first to the 20-minute opening Revel – a four-part world premiere by British composer Daniel Kidane describing a day in the life of a young Mancunian (narrated with strenuous larkiness by the actor EM Williams) as they attend a carnival.
You waited for the music to generate precisely the promised primal excitement and ecstasy of carnival; instead, you got one piece conveying the jostle of a commute; another evoking the rain. Meanwhile, Lemn Sissay popped up from a sofa to read out his poems about the weather. What a mishmash, failing both to dramatise its own subject matter and make any meaningful sense to children. My eight-year-old spent most of it kicking the chair in front of her.
At least Saint-saëns’s suite – 14 short movements, each devoted to a different animal – is pretty indestructible. Morpurgo was on hand to deliver his poems, which have the same vivid gestural quality as the pieces they accompany. My daughter enjoyed trying to guess which animal was being evoked, with individual details sparkling: piano chords bubbled with eerie beauty on Aquarium, xylophones scuttled madly on the irresistible Fossils, Sheku delivered a sublime solo swan. Young children, including mine, danced along in their seats.
Yet one wishes Saint-saëns and the Kanneh-masons had been allowed simply to get on with the job of animating the animals. There is so much pictorial detail and tonal variation, so many irrepressible dynamics, the individual works scarcely need any accompaniment. Instead, there was an ill-conceived attempt to dress up the whole thing as a performance. Not necessarily a problem in principle, but if you want to go down that route, you need a dramaturg of sorts to pull it all together.
Instead, what we got felt frustratingly diffuse. The increasingly wearisome Williams appeared first wearing a lion’s costume, then used a helmet to depict the tortoise and ping pong balls for chicken eggs, but after that appeared to abandon animal role-playing altogether, presumably leaving those children who had come dressed as animals wondering why they’d bothered. An audience call and response for the cuckoo seemed to go on and on forever. Several awkward breaks, prompting unnecessary audience applause between pieces, added to a general sense of disconnect. And it was a crying shame no one thought it a good idea to introduce the individual members of the Kannehmasons to an audience full of children, given that the youngest, the cellist Mariatu, is just 11.
“Hmm,” said my daughter after it had finished. “I didn’t really enjoy that very much.” We went home and found the Kanneh-mason recording on Spotify, and immediately felt much better.
Hear this Prom for 30 days on the BBC Sounds app. Proms tickets: 020 7070 4441; bbc.co.uk/proms