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

The Prom on August 20 commemorated the centennial of Miles Davis’s birth. Davis was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most important musicians of the 20th century, but he was not a composer and not just a performer. He was a composing performer, who probably never played the same thing the same way twice. His playing is known to many people, just about everybody now, through his recordings, which were a single example of how he would have done something, and which are also very much a product of his work with arrangers, most especially Gil Evans. It is their

The Proms concert on August 10 was presented by an orchestra consisting of students from the Juilliard School in New York and the Royal Academy of Music, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, with Vilde Frang as violin soloist. The program consisted of works by three of the most imporant composers of the early twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky (Symphony in Three Movements, 1942-45), Alban Berg (Violin Concerto, 1935, and Béla Bartok, Concerto for Ochestra, 1943-rev 1945). The Stravinsky, written after his move to California is a reaction not only to the ongoing world war (the program notes quoted Stravinsky in one of

The Prom on August 4 was presented by BBC Symphony Orchestra, along with the BBC Symphony Chorus and the Constanza Chorus, conducted by Hannu Tintu. It opened with Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna by Pierre Boulez, in commemoration of the centennial of Boulez’s birth. Written later in his life, when Boulez’s conducting career seemed to limit his compositional activity, Rituel is an austere ceremonial progression of textures and instrumental colors, lasting approximately half an hour. Both its structural strategy and its expressive effect are somewhat reminiscent of Stravinky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. It was given a very effective performance with

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 performers for the Prom concert on July 28 were the BBC Scottish Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. The first piece, and, for a certain cohort, the most important was Earth Dances by Harrison Birtwistle. Written during 1985 and 1986, it is one of his major single movement pieces for large orchestra. The work features six strata, each with a characteristic intervallic “hierarcy,” register, and rhythmic characteristic. The interaction and progression of those strata, which defines its structure, produces a sense of a certain menacing quality and a sort of subterranean intensity, driving to a climax which Jonathan Cross in

On the 18th and 19th of August Dave Smith’s 75th birthday was celebrated at Café Oto with two concerts of his music, performed by Jan Steele, Janet Sherbourne, and himself. Each concert began with Smith, who is an extremely masterly pianist performing works of his, and concluded with Steele and Sherbourne performing his major work, Albanian Summer. Albanian Summer was written in 1980 for Steele and Sherbourne, and performed widely by them for a while. These performances were the first in about 30 years. The work is a sort of travelog of a number of summers that Smith spent in

The Prom on August 10 was presented by The National Youth Orchestra, conducted by Alexandre Bloch and Tess Jackson. The 160 members of the orchestra, who completely filled the stage, were joined by the almost as large cohort of NYO Inspire, who were in various places in the hall, including the gallery, some boxes, the choir seating areas behind the stage, and, eventually, in the aisles of the stalls. The program began with the Overture to The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner, and concluded with the Symphony No. 1 of Gustav Mahler. In between those were two works, Orpheus Undone

The late-night Prom on August 9, presented by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment, conducted by Chloe Rooke, was devoted to a single work, Songs of Wars I Have Seen by Heiner Goebbels. The work was written in 2007 for those same two groups, on commission from the Southbank Centre, for the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall after its two year-long renovation. Songs of Wars I Have Seen is based on Gertrude Stein’s book detailing her life in occupied France during World War II. The ins and outs of how Stein and her companion

The BBC Prom on August 7 was presented by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by John Storgårds. It featured Stefan Dohr as soloist in the Horn Concerto by Hans Abrahamsen, written between 2018 and 2019. The work is mostly a monologue by the soloist which is provided with a luminous and quite beautiful backdrop, sometimes reactive and interactive, and sometimes just a background, but always aurally compelling. Although the movements are designated by tempo, they are really differentiated more by the density of the, as it were, accompaniment than by the actually speed of the music. At the end of the