A firecracker kicks off Proms
Finds a young composer and pianist dominating the at the Albert Hall
Framing the opening event of the world’s biggest music festival is bound to be a ticklish business. Should it be light and celebratory, to show that a festival devoted mostly to classical music can be fun? Or should it be deeply serious, as a counter-weight to the high jinks of the Last Night? Should it bold or conservative, youthful or silvery-haired, one big thing or a smörgåsbord of little things?
Friday night’s Prom masterfully achieved all these things at once – but only if you stretch a point and view the entire weekend as a giant opening statement. For last night and today the spotlight falls on big pieces and “silver-haired wisdom”, with three concerts led by two conductors whose combined age is 162; Daniel Barenboim and Sir Bernard Haitink. Tonight’s concert includes the UK premiere of Deep Time by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, who turned
83 on Friday.
All this left the way open for the First Night to strike a more youthful note – which it did from the word go. The first piece we heard was a five-minute firecracker from the 28-year-old Tom Coult, played with tremendous brio by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under conductor Edward Gardner. Coult is a composer who spins glittering, teasingly ambiguous patterns out of simple-seeming material. Earlier this year the London Sinfonietta premiered a piece of his that was built entirely out of scale patterns.
His new piece, St John’s Dance, began with something even less promising – a wispy little phrase on a violin, repeated, leading to a few patterings on percussion. Then, suddenly, we were off into a capering dance punctuated by huge major chords, each hurled across the main melody at a peculiar angle. In its gleeful reinvention of familiar things and ostentatious brilliance Coult’s piece recalled Thomas Adès, but the music’s sly way of pulling the rug out from under its own feet, plunging from noise to near silence, revealed a very individual voice.
What it didn’t do was build anything of real heft or substance. This was surprising in a piece ostensibly inspired by the medieval phenomenon of St John’s Dance, which struck whole communities with a strange dancing madness. The programme note informed us that this was “a horrific experience”. There was nothing of that darkness or horror in Coult’s piece, which was light as thistledown. It was a perfect example of the Peter Pan tendency in some areas of new music, which is all about magic and enchantment, toying with big themes without really embracing them.
After that came a piece that also had its moments of sly wit, but at bottom was deeply moving; Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3. Youth made an appearance here, too, in the shape of pianist Igor Levit. He turned 30 this year, but in truth Levit is young only in strictly chronological terms. As a musician, he seems older than his years. He showed more than once on this occasion that just starting a piece is agonisingly hard: he seemed to be formulating the right weight and tone in his mind before venturing the first note. The results were often spellbinding. The cadenza of the first movement took on a vast scope, ranging from the softest pianissimo to a climax of Lisztian grandeur.
Levit had such a fine command of piano sound that even the simple octave-doubled melodies in the first movement seemed unusually eloquent. But there were times in the slow movement when Levit played with such a faraway, inward tone that the orchestra couldn’t achieve a good balance, even with such a sensitive and quick-witted conductor as Gardner on the podium. Levit needs to be careful that in his pursuit of depth, he doesn’t end up coming across as wilful or mannered.
After that came a different sort of spiritual uplift – John Adams’s Harmonium from 1981. This is the piece where Adams came of age, leaving behind the floating, trancelike patterns of his earlier pieces to tackle big themes with big forces and gestures. Adams sets three poems for choir and orchestra which deal with the nature of love, and the eternity that awaits us in the hereafter. The piece received a glowing performance.
The constant back-and-forth between stillness and speed was controlled by Gardner, and the BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC Proms Youth Choir sang with full-throated fervour. If Adams’s score felt more like strenuous aspiration towards the heights than genuine transcendence, they certainly weren’t to blame.