The Prom on August 23, which was presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alain Altinoglu, concluded with a performance of Amérique by Edgard Varèses, having begun with Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments in its 1947 version, The Dvorak ‘Cello Concerto, with Gautier Capuçon soloist, and Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The title of the piece had dual meanings, just as Varèses’s intentions were multiple. The work was on one hand a sort of portrait of the active and bustling New York City, but it also had the intention of opening new, as it were, vistas of sound available for composition. The title implied both the new world as it existed, but also the possibility of exploration. So the music is full of energy and activity and the depiction of day to day noise in a specific way that was new in music. Although it has a momentary quite beginning (possibly referring to the beginning of The Afternoon of the Faun and offering a tribute to Debussy), Amérique’s energy and intensity is incessant and ever increasing. That intensity and energy was completely realized by this performance.

The Prom on August 22 was presented by the Chineke! Orchestra, conducted by Jonathon Heyward and featured the soprano Angel Blue. It opened with a reconstruction of a work by the African American, British educated, at the Royal Academy of Music, composer, Edmund Thornton Jenkins. The work, which was conceived when he was a student in London, called Ballet, was reconstructed from existing parts and a piano reduction, by his great-newphew, Tuffus Zimbabwe. It was the first performance of any of Jenkins’s music on the Proms.

The central work on the program was Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915, which featured Blue. The piece sets a text by James Agee and can be justifiably described as nostalgic. It is also arguably Barber’s best piece. The text is written in the first person, but Blue gave it a quality somewhat akin to what happens in Thorton Wilder plays, especially Our Town, where a character addresses the audience directly. She gave it an especially directly personal and expressive quality that was very moving and unforgettable. She followed the Barber with some songs from what is probably described these days as the American Song Book. Her performances of those pieces, including My Funny Valentine (Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart), Our Love Is Here to Stay (Goerge and Ira Gershwin), That Old Black Magic (Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer), and Puttin’ On the Ritz (Irving Berlin), was mostly masterful and compelling. For this listener the performance of My Funny Valentine compared favorably to Ella Fitzgerald’s recording. The order of the songs was not the same as what was listed in the program, and one of the songs listed was not performed. The concert concluded with a very lovely and lovely-sounding performance of the Dvorak Eighth Symphony.

As is the current practice, the Prom on August 29, presented by the Oslo Philharmonic, conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, was advertised as containing music by Stravinsky and Prokofiev without mentioning that it would be opened by the first Proms performance of Symphonic Poem no. 1, ‘Forest Morning’ by Øyvind Torvund. The work was as evocative as one might expect a piece with that title to be. It seemed to have at the beginning, random, or at least random seeming, recordings of birds, but those sound morphed into similar figures that were clearly played by instruments in the orchestra, so that after a while it wasn’t completely clear that there ever had been recordings of actual birds. The program quoted Torvund in saying “…I also like to think about all the smaller, perhaps psychedelic sounds in nature, those that are found naturally and can remind you of electronic sounds. The mirroring of sounds is one of the things that fascinates me the most.” So who knows? In any case, the shape and progress of the piece was compelling and impressive and very enjoyable. The Stravinsky work was the Violin Concerto, which was performed with the soloist Patricia Kopatchinskyaja. As her encore, regretting the absence of cadenzas and chances for soloistic displays in the piece, she played a very technically complicated and showy “candenza” which she had written based on material in the concerto. The concert concluded with a rousing performance of music from Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev. As an encore at the end of the concert, the orchestra played another piece by Torvund, apparently orchestrated in the five previous days, entitled Starry Night. This one clearly made use of recorded sounds and was highly effective and also very enjoyable.