The Prom on July 31, presented by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Joshua Weilerstein, as so many of the concerts during this stretch of time, included a work of Rachmaninov, the Symphonic Dances, which ended the concert. It began with Symphony No. 2 by Elsa Barraine, a composer unknown before this point to this listener. Barraine was a French composer, trained at the Paris Conservatory, where she was a student of Paul Dukas. The fact that she was a woman and Jewish and politically active made her life, both personal and professional, difficult during the time leading up to the second world war. She survived the war, and in her later life taught at the Paris Conservatory and was a theater inspector for the French Ministry of Culture. She died in 1999. Barraine’s Second Symphony was written in 1938 and is subtitled ‘Voina’ (Russian for War). The tension of the time are inescapable in various ways, including that the second movement is a Funeral March. The work, which is relatively brief, lasting 17 minutes, is masterful, with a brilliantly transparent texture and orchestration. This listener is anxious to discover more of her music.

By far the dominant personality of the concert was the soloist, clarinetist Martin Fröst, who played in concertos by Aaron Copland and Artie Shaw. He came on stage with swagger and immediately owned the room. Not only was he selling things big to the audience, he was always in a very obvious way in just about continuous contact with members of the orchestra, causing one to wonder exactly who was actually conducting the orchestra. His encore, which consisted of his playing the first prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier while the audience, with some help from member of the string section of the orchestra, sang the tune which Gounod wrote for it to accompany, was really sort of magical, and in some ways the most memorable part of the concert. The Copland concerto, written for Benny Goodman, and therefore inescapably influenced by jazz (although written at a later time than Copland’s “classic” jazz pieces, the Piano Concerto and Music for the Theatre), seemed to this listened to be a very uneven piece. The first of the two movements, an expansive and expressive slow movement, is very very beautiful; the second seems somewhat aimless and repetitive. The Artie Shaw Concerto took its form, the form it was presented in the concert, as two sides of a 78rpm recording, and became a great hit for him. He is quoted in Alyn Shipton’s notes of the pieces as saying, “I didn’t really write anything–I just dictated a frame.” Exactly. Nonetheless, both the Copland and the Shaw provided Fröst with a platform for his playing, which was excellent in every respect, and his personality which is mammoth. The performance of the Rachmaninov which was the second half of the concert was excellent and beyond any kind of reproach, even if less magnetic than the music and playing of the first half.

This concert was followed by a late night concert presented by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Tônu Kaljuste., which celebrated the 90th birthday of Arvo Pärt. Pärt’s choral music, which is more apparently placid and spacious, unlike his more active–at least on the surface–and aggressive instrumental tintinnabuli music, is expertly written and very beautiful. It’s also not terrible varied stylistically and musically. That variety in this concert, which included eight of his pieces, was provided by other people’s music, including works of Rachmaninov, (again) Bach, and the Estonian composer Galina Grigorjeva, but most noticeably by the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’s Curse Upon Iron. All of the pieces on the program received performances that were apparently flawless, and characterized by gorgeous sound.

Rachmaninov was once again the headliner of the Proms concert on August 1, presented by The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kazuki Yamada. Yunchan Lim was the soloist in the Fourth Piano Concerto. With so much of Rachmaninov’s music featured—three pieces on three consecutive concerts in three days, one wondered if it was some kind of Rachmaninov year. The answer must be that every year is a Rachmaninov year. In the case of the concert on August 1, the pieces not mentioned were The Chairman Dances by John Adams and Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. The Adams is a skillful and brilliantly orchestrated piece. A quotation from Virgil Thomson, “It’s the perfect appetizer. Nobody’s appetite was ever spoiled by it and nobody missed much by missing it.” might apply. An alarm of some sort interrupted by Rachmaninov, causing an unanticipated break between the first and second movements.

The Berio Sinfonia, aside from being one of his most important works, is also the archetypal 1960’s composition. It was written for and is dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, who conducted its first performance, and it features, in its third movement, a sort of collage of pieces and styles and elements, along with a text from Beckett, within the frame of the third movement of the Mahler Second Symphony. That movement is preceded by a movement based on scraps of from Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked, and another movement which is a memorial to Martin Luther King, an orchestration of a chamber work of Berio’s whose text is the phonemes of King’s name (in a sort of staggering racist statement Richard Taruskin criticized the piece because it could not have been understood as music by King–an assumption of his about King), and is followed, after an interlude, with a finale which Berio wrote, ‘might be considered the veritable analysis of the Sinfonia, carried out through the language and medium of the composition itself.’

This performance, in which the orchestra was joined by members of the BBC Singers, was brilliant and completely compelling, and as good as one could ever imagine happening, especially since the sound person who was in charge of the amplification of the voices, not only controlled that just about perfectly, but clearly knew the music and knew which parts of the texts needed to be heard clearly. Everything about the experience was exhilarating and memorable.