Lili Boulanger is a composer who is at the intersection of two of the focuses of this year’s Proms programs: women composers and the centennial of the end of the First World War, which coincided with the year of her death at age of 24. Boulanger was clearly one of the great talents in music history, the equal of, for instance, the famously precocious Mendelssohn and Shostakovitch, both of whom lived long enough to fully realize their astonishingly early promise. Works of hers are included in four concerts of this season of the Proms.

Pour les funérailles d’un soldat, a short work written by Boulanger between 1912 and 1913 as an assignment her harmony teacher, Georges Caussade, was presumably a sort of test run for the Prix de Rome composition competition. It won the Prix Lepaulle in 1913, which was the same year that Boulanger became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for her cantata Fauste et Hélène. Pour les funérailles d’un soldat opened the Prom concert presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Edward Gardner on August 12. The work sets a text by Alfred de Musset, a portion of his verse play Les coupe et les lèvres (1832). It deals with the burial ceremonies for a captain, whose Christianity is as important a factor as his military status. The work is a highly dramatic choral realization of the scene with an impassioned envoy to the fallen soldier sung by a baritone soloists (in this performance by Alexandre Duhamel), before concluding with a return of the chorus. It is brief (about seven minutes long) and powerfully evocative.

The rest of the concert consisted of the Elgar ‘Cello Concerto, which was his last major orchestral work, and the only one following the First World War, played by Jean-Guilen Queyras, who played music by Dutilleux as an encore. The concert concluded with Dona Nobis Pacem by Vaughan Williams, which included soloists Sophie Bevan, soprano, and Neal Davies, bass-baritone. Rather than being so much a reaction to the First World War (it was written in 1936), in which Vaughan Williams had been an ambulance driver in France, it is more a warning of the next war which came three years after its composition. It has always seemed to me to be the least satisfaction of Vaughan Williams’s big choral pieces, and this performance, which was as good as anybody could wish, didn’t persuade me otherwise. Its chief interest, it seems to me, is in its continuation of Vaughan Williams’s interest in the poetry of Whitman, which goes back to the beginning of his career.

Du fond de l’abîme, Boulanger’s setting of the 130 Psalm, was on the Prom presented by City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the CBSO Chorus and Youth Chorus, conducted by Ludovic Morlot, on August 15. They were joined in the Boulanger by the mezzo-soprano Justina Gringytê. Finished in 1917, four years later than Pour les funéraille d’un soldat, Du fond de l’abîme is both more free in its instrumental writing and the use of its material and demonstrates considerably greater technical control and a more pronounced personal quality. Roger Nichols in his program note speculates that both the course of the First World War and the continual prospect of her death from what is now diagnosed as Crohn’s Disease contributed to the dramatic intensity of the work. Although that intensity is one of its most immediately apparent aspects, its shaping, and the control of its trajectory are remarkable. Albert Hall is not a particularly kind place for singers, but even so, the diction of the singers was not at all clear. In this program the Boulanger was placed in the context of her most important contemporaries, Debussy (who died in the same year) and Ravel, and her music was not at all outclassed by them, even if it has a slightly more “traditional” manner and language. Caroline Potter in her biography of Boulanger in the program points out that “nobody listens to music because of its composer’s potential,” and while it is true that the power and accomplishment of Boulanger’s works that exist are compelling and satisfying, it is also true that it is tragic that she didn’t live longer (her older sister, Nadia, died in 1979, for instance) and trace a longer line of the development of her personality, and one can’t help but think of what she might have done further along in her life as a composer. The Debussy works on the program were the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and the Nocturnes; the concert concluded with Ravel’s Bolero. The playing in all these pieces was wonderful.

The Prom on August 18, presented by The London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Simon Rattle was an all Ravel, featuring his opera L’enfant et les sortilège, preceded by the ballet version of Mother Goose and Shérézade, with its super-orientalized text. The soloist in
Shérézade was mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožena, who also sang the role of the child in the opera. L’enfant et les sortilège is the favorite piece of Ravel’s of many people, and it is easy to understand why, especially in this performance which presented it vividly and lovingly. All of the playing by the London Symphony Orchestra, and strikingly by its principle flute player, Gareth Davies, was, even by the standard of the playing on the Proms, exceptionally beautiful.

Recordings of these concerts are available for a month at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09yjc3r/episodes/player.

Rudolph Botta, as Philip Venables wrote in his program note for his concerto Venables Plays Bartok, had a remarkable life. Born in 1918, Botta pursued, as a teenager, two passions: playing the violin and fencing. He served in the Hungarian army during the Second World War, then was a member of the anti-Soviet resistance. He was sent by the Soviets to a labor camp in 1952, and during the time that he was there, was deliberately tortured and maimed so that he could no longer play the violin. After his release from the camp (as part of an amnesty following Stalin’s death), he started a music school in his hometown of Bonyhád. He was a leader of the 1956 Hungarian revolution before fleeing to the United Kingdom with his family. After a short stint as a window cleaner, Botta became a teacher at the Royal Manchester College of Music (now called the Royal Northern College of Music), where he was influential on the lives and training of countless violinist, including Marilyn Shearn, among whose students was Philip Venables. In November of 1993, when the young Venables was fourteen years old and preparing for his Grade 6 ABRSM violin exam, Shearn took him, along with three other pupils, to play for Botta. Twenty-five years later, when helping his parents move house, Venables discovered a copy of a long forgotten video tape of the masterclass with Botta which his teacher had made. That rediscovery caused Venables to begin a process of research involving Botta’s life and a consideration of the intertwining of lives, musical and otherwise, of teachers and students, and, eventually to the composition of Venables Plays Bartok, a work which could be considered a violin concerto, but which he also describes as a ‘radio music drama’. A BBC commission, it was given its fist performance on the Proms concert presented on August 17th by BBC Symphony, conducted by Sakari Oramo.

The framework for Venables Plays Bartok is eight short pieces for violin by Bartok, including the Six Rumanian Folk Dances, one of which, Evening in the Village, Venables had played for Botta in the masterclass. In between these pieces of Bartok’s are swaths of music, some of which are orchestrations of those pieces, some stretches of original music based on the material of the Bartok, and recordings of the voices of Jot Davies and Venables reading excerpts of Botta’s unplublished memoir, Under a Cloudy Sky, and other texts which trace the histories of the lives of Botta and Venables which converge at the masterclass, and their further confluence with the history of the making of this work. The interaction of Bartok’s music with Venables’s, and of recorded spoken text, both the excerpts and bits of the actual coaching with Botta, with one aspect prominent and then receding as the focus shifts to another (at one point I found myself remembering Stravinsky’s comment about the first time he heard Pierrot Lunaire–that he wished the singer would shut up so he could hear the music–and then at another regretted the music’s making it hard to understand the speaking), the clarity of the time shifts in the stories, and the control and balancing of density of textures, is always engaging and interesting, but the unfolding of aspects of one person’s life and how it and he then go on to impact other lives in various ways is completely compelling and very moving. It was impressive in its conception and its masterly realization, and completely satisfying as a total experience.

Pekka Kuusisto, the soloist, was also a sort of master of ceremonies and guide through the piece, introducing and explaining it at the beginning and announcing each of the Bartok pieces as they appeared. His playing was pretty much perfect. It is common on Proms concerts for the soloist to offer an encore, usually some fancy show piece. Kuusisto’s was perfectly in keeping with the nature of the Venebles work. With the, apparently, extemporaneous, assistance of members of the orchestra, he sang and whistled a Swedish song from the nineteenth century called “We Sold Our Homes” concerning the mass migration of Swedes to the United States, introducing it in a way that made its connection to current immigration issues explicit. It was, as a political statement and as an aesthetic experience, hardly less powerful or enthralling than the Venables.

This concert, along with all the other Proms concerts, is available for listening on line for a month at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bf4kvq.

This year’s Proms as well as commemorating the centennial of the end of the First World War is also marking the centennial of The Representation of the People Act, which gave voting rights to some women in the United Kingdom for the first time. The means of commemorating that law is the commissioning of eight female composers whose music has not been performed in the Proms before, and a pledge that half the BBC Commissions for the Proms will be, by 2020, from women composers. Coincidentally with that celebration is the celebration of the 90th birthday of Thea Musgrave, whose Phoenix Rising, from 1997, was performed on the August 7 concert by the BBC Symphony, conducted by Richard Farnes. Phoenix Rising is a almost half hour single movement whose central idea is the dramatic movement from desolation and shadow to light and hope. These qualities are personified in the work by the timpanist, representing forces of darkness and the solo horn serving, as the program notes said, “as the distant voice of hope that leads to rebirth and life.” In the course of the performance, the horn player appears from off stage and leads a sort of uprising, literally, from amongst the rank of the orchestra, mainly the brass players, and foils the timpanist, who leaves the state in disgust and from time to time makes his existence known from offstage. This is depiction of the Phoenix rising from the ashes is all accomplished over six sections of dramatically contrasted music. The representation of this drama on stage may be a little unconvincing, but the actual music of the piece is genuinely dramatic and convincing. The orchestral writing is always brilliant and effective. The performance, which seemed as good as anybody could every want, was followed by an equally wonderful and powerful performance of the Brahms Requiem.

The Proms concert on August 8, presented by the BBC Philharmonic, with soprano Sally Matthews, conducted by Juanjo Mena, was an Anglo-American program, consisting of works by Walton, Britten, Barber, and Copland. Copland’s Connotations, written for the opening of what was then called Philharmonic Hall (later called Avery Fisher Hall, and now known as David Geffen Hall) on September 23, 1962, is one of those pieces that seems forever to be under the cloud of its unsuccessful first performance. It was a strange offering for what should have been a festive occasion, since it is not at all festive. In fact it’s downright dour and forbidding, and it certainly produced that effect at its first performance. Copland wrote in his program note that he intended to express “something of the tensions, aspirations, and drama inherent in the world of today.” Bad choice. In addition he let it be known that it was a “twelve-tone” piece, which was in and of itself the kiss of death. Jacqueline Kennedy, who was sitting next to Copland at the performance, responded to it by saying, “Oh, Mr. Copland!” Copland found this puzzling until Verna Fine explained to him later that that meant that Kennedy hadn’t liked it and couldn’t think of anything to say. Copland could have done himself and all the rest of us a favor by keeping quite about the twelve-tone thing, what ever that meant, anyway. Otherwise people would have probably just thought something along the line of its being a return to the language and procedures of his earlier ultra-modernist works, such as the Piano Variations. Copland told Bernstein that he had turned to “the twelve-tone method” because he needed to find new chords. In fact the harmonic language of Connotations is only slightly, if at all, more astringent, or different, than those earlier works. It shares with all of the rest of Copland’s music an angularity and muscular rhythmic drive, and does have the sort of monumental quality that Copland was presumably intending. It’s actually quite a good piece and it was good to hear it.

Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra was another, even more notorious and more public, flop. Written for the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s hall in Lincoln Center, it was also intended as a star vehicle for Leontyne Price, the Met’s reigning diva at the time. It was weighted down by the impossibleness of rising to the occasion and, apparently, not at a helped by Fanco Zeffirelli’s production, described by Barber himself as costly, confusing, and overloaded., or by Zeffirelli’s involvement in work on the libretto. The failure was apparently devastating to Barber at the time and adversely effected the rest of his career. Having dallied some with “the twelve-tone method” earlier on, for instance in his Piano Sonata, by the time of Antony and Cleopatra, Barber was a staunch anti-modernist. Two of the scenes from the opera, both being elaborate and dramatic show-pieces for the main character were extracted from the opera and are its most often performed parts; the first is from early on, involving Cleopatra’s reaction to Anthony’s leaving to go to Rome and marry Caesar’s sister, the second from the end of the opera, where Cleopatra, with Antony already dead, is preparing for her suicide by asp. Barber, being the nephew of a major singer in the early days of the Metropolitan Opera (Louise Homer) and of a successful composer of ‘art songs’ (Sidney Homer), both of whom were his mentors, as well as having been a singer himself, certainly knew about writing for the voice, and it is striking in these excerpts that he knew how to write music that lies well on and is flattering to the voice, and that he knew all the best and most effective high notes for Price and her successors performing the piece. The music itself, though, seems, to this listener, anyway, somewhat lackluster, effortful, and tired. Sally Mathews, the soprano in this performance, made a meal of it, and put it over as well as anybody might be expected to do. The Barber was shown to even more disadvantage by the Four Sea Interludes from ‘Peter Grimes’ by Benjamin Britten which followed it, and seemed in this context completely effortlessly perfect. Earlier in the concert Matthews had been the soloist in Britten’s Les Illuminations, a piece which I’ve never much liked. This performance, although as far as I could tell, flawless, didn’t persuade me to think otherwise about it. The concert had opened with Walton’s Portsmouth Point, which is endlessly jolly and rambunctious and enjoyable. All the playing on the concert was really first rate.
All of the performances on the Proms are available for listening through the Proms website for a month.

The Proms is certainly the major musical happening in London during the summer, but it’s not the only thing going on. There were/are two opera companies doing summer festivals of operas during July and August. Tête à Tête Opera did a number or performances, including Tom Randle’s Love Me to Death, Li-E Chen’s Proposition for a Silent Opera, Dear Marie Stopes by Alex Mills, and an evening of songs by Errollyn Wallen, none of which I was able to hear. The Arcola Opera’s season which runs from July 24 to August 26 includes the a 50th anniversary production of Elephant Steps by Stanley Silverman and a production of Greek by Mark Antony Turnage, directed by Jonathan Moore, marking that work’s 30th anniversary. I was able to attend the performance of Greek on August 11, which was conducted by Tim Anderson, with a cast consisting of Phillippa Boyle, Edmund Danon, Richard Morrison, and Laura Woods, with the Kantanti Ensemble as the orchestra. Greek was adapted by Turnage and Moore from the play by Steve Berkoff, re-telling the Oedipus myth but set in the east end of London. Despite the fact that the dialect sometimes can seem like a foreign language (at least to an American), the opera holds one’s attention and interest (to say the least) for its entire 90 minute duration. The instrumental writing and textures are continually inventive, masterly, and interesting, and the control of the dramatic trajectory of the length of the piece is impressive and completely compelling. Greek is really outstanding work of theater and of music, and this production was as compelling and convincing as the work itself.