Dave Smith is an excellent composer and a formidable pianist. In his early days he played in the Scratch Orchestra, and over the course of his career he has worked with the likes of Cardew, White, Skempton, Nyman, Bryars, and Parsons, and was an early champion and performer in the UK of Glass, Reich, and Riley. For the concert of his music celebrating his 70th birthday at Cafe Oto the place was packed. The largest and most recent (2018-2019) work on the program, Hunter of Stories, lasting 70 minutes, was described by Smith in his program notes as being a posthumous collaboration between the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), John Tillbury, and himself. Tilbury’s part of the collaboration was the selection of excerpts from Galeano’s final book whose name was given to this project, which are separated by short musical interludes by Smith. The spoken texts, which Smith described as, “intentionally varied, dealing with universal issues as well as the realities of Latin America, indigenous and modern,” were originally in Spanish, and are here presented in translations by Mark Fried. The thirty-two vignettes are divided into two groups, separated by a longer interlude; the entire set is framed by two longer pieces serving as prologue and epilogue. Some of the interludes draw on tunes from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, as well as from the Western Sahara. The work is dedicated to Tilbury. In this performance Tilbury was the speaker and Smith was the pianist.

Tilbury, joined by speaker Ella Marsh, was the pianist is These Special Colours (2002), a short, at least by the terms of this concert, work whose musical material is a Palestinian song called ‘For the Flag,’ and includes a poem published in the Palestinian Chronicle of March 26, 2002, by the thirteen year old Nura Salameh, describing the Palestinian flag. The concluding work, Kaivopuisto (1995-96), an approximately half hour long work in four continuous sections, was originally for ‘cello and piano. Smith was joined by Ian Mitchell in the first performance of a more recent version for bass clarinet and piano. Smith’s notes explained that Kaivopuisto is a large park in Helsinki which he visited in August of 1995 and that ”the piece is in no way descriptive although the (correct) impression may be that the park was spacious and the weather unusually hot.”

All of the performances on the concert were, apparently, flawless; they were certainly definitive.

Another theme of this year’s Proms is the 150th Anniversary of the birth of Henry Wood, the founder of the Proms. This celebration includes a survey of works which he introduced to Britain, and their number is legion, ranging from works of British composers, to composers such as Ravel and Sibelius, through works of Schoenberg and Webern. This anniversary was also the occasion for a concert at Holy Sepulchre London (Otherwise known as St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate}. Henry Wood’s father was a tenor in the choir of the church, and Wood himself studied organ at the church and later became assistant organist. He is also buried there, and there is a memorial window to Wood (along with windows to John Ireland, Nellie Melba, and Walter Carroll) which was dedicated in 1946, in the side chapel of the church, which has, since 1955, been designated as The Musician’s Chapel. There is a book of remembrance, maintained by Friends of the Musician’s Chapel memorializing many musicians, including John Cage. This concert, on August 17, was presented by the BBC Singers, conducted by Sofie Jeannin, was. in fact. a showcase of 20th and 21st century British choral music. The concert opened with Where Does the Uttered Music Go? by William Walton, setting a poem by John Masefield, who was at the time Poet Laureate of The UK, which had been written for the dedication of the Henry Wood memorial window, and it ended with a short new piece by Joanna Lee, At This Man’s Hand, a BBC Commision, setting a short poem by Masefield which is in fact in the window. In between those two works the concert included shorter pieces by John Ireland, Vaughan Williams, Helena Paish (a winner of the INSPIRE competition for young composers), and Eizabeth Maconchy. There were also three large works, Sacred and Profane by Benjamin Britten, Rorate Coeli by Thea Musgrave, and Missa del Cid by Judith Weir.

Sacred and Profane, written in the last year of Britten’s life, is a set of eight relatively short pieces setting texts in Middle English. One might cynically think that Britten was trying to recapture the success of the Ceremony of Carols, whose texts are also in Middle English, but Sacred and Profane is much more astringent both in sound and in manner, and comes off as being downright forbidding. The Musgrave, setting texts of the Scottish poet William Dunbar, is intense and loud and exciting, and somewhat unvaried. It leave an impression of being a big impressive block of continuous sound, without all the much detail–certainly not in clarity of its text.. Judith Weir’s Missa el Cid, combines parts of a translation of a Spanish medieval poem celebrating El Cid’s reconquest of Spain from the Moors and some of the text of the mass, presenting and shaping the story of El Cid in the form of the mass The use of a speaking narration at the beginning of each section is reminiscent of the manner of Weir’s earlier work King Harald’s Saga, and the effect here, as in the earlier piece, is clever, oddly dramatic, and effective.

Music by Walton, which began the concert on August 17, ended the Prom presented on August 20 by The London Symphony Orchestra, along with the London Symphony Chorus, and Orfeó Català and the Orfeó Català Youth Choir, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. The choruses consisted of many singers, and they and the orchestra, assisted by two brass groups, made a big sound in Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast one of the archetypal big British works for chorus and orchestra, which more than filled the enormous space of the Albert Hall. Gerald Finley was the baritone soloist. Their performance was vivid and full of detail and exciting.

The concert began with Les Bandar-log by Charles Koechlin, and Edgar Varèse’s Amériques in its original version of 1921. The Koechlin, evoking Kipling’s The Jungle Book, where the band of monkeys are called by a Hindi term, ‘bandar-log’, to satirize musical trends and contemporary composers of the 1930s, using 12 note tunes and neo-classical fugual textures to portray the composers as gleeful followers of any newfangled trend that comes along. Koechlin was an extremely subtle and skillful composer, and a fabulous orchestrator, and his satire is achieved through the most polished and suave means, producing a very engaging narrative. Varèse started Amériques, his biggest single work, in New York right after he had immigrated to the United States and it is full of what could be described as big city music, portraying the sounds of New York as, he wrote, “all, discoveries, all adventures….the Unknown, new worlds on this planet, in outer space, and in the minds of man.” That big conception is realized with extravagant abandon, with lots of notes and lots of sound produced by an enormous orchestra, including 13 percussionists who seem to play continuously. For all its excessive motion and hyperactive surface, the work is essentially static, and, for this listener, anyway, wears out its welcome before it stops, but it’s exciting and bracing all the while it’s going on. It was striking how well matched the three enormous, noisy and not immediately apparently compatible pieces fit together to make an interesting and satisfying program featuring both their differences and their similarities in languages and manners and spirit..

The Prom on August 18 was billed as ‘Youthful Beginnings”, consisted of firsts: the first Symphonies of Beethoven and Shostakovich, as well as Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, written when the composer was sixteen, and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Fairytale Poem of 1971, her earliest completely orchestra work. The work is a piece of program music telling the story of a piece of chalk, who, although dreaming of drawing wonderful castles, gardens, and the sea, finds itself used for writing boring words, numbers and geometric figures. Just as the chalk has become worn down (literally) from all of this dreary work, it finds itself in total darkness and assumes it is dead. However the darkness is the pocket of a boy who has taken the chalk, and put it in his pocket. He uses the chalk for drawing pictures of wonderful castles, gardens, and the sea on sidewalks, so in the end the chalk finds happiness even though it also finds its extinction. The clarity of the story telling in Fairytale Story is not all that clear, but it is, nonetheless, continually and completely interesting and compelling as music.

The conductor Martyn Brabbins has been and continues to be a champion of new music and of British composers in particular. In celebration of his 60th birthday, the BBC commissioned fourteen composers with whom he has been associated to join in producing a collaborative work, entitled Pictured Within, which is related to the Elgar Enigma Variations, and this project was presented by Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on their Prom on August 13. The participating composers were Dai Fujikura, David Sawyer, Sally Beamish, Colin Matthews, Iris ter Schiphorst, Brett Dean, Wim Henderickx, Richard Blackford, Harrision Birtwistle, Judith Weir, Gavin Bryars, Kalevi Aho, Anthony Payne, and John Pickard. This new project was supplied with its own enigma: the theme, somewhat related to the Elgar original, was written by an anonymous composer. Each of the composers was asked to model his or her variation on one specific Elgar variation, and each of those variations was supposed to be roughly the same relative length as its model. The sense that each of the variations is a commentary on aspects of specific variations and on the Elgar as a whole in the voice of that particular composer gives the whole project a coherence and, frankly, interest that one might not have expected from first hearing about it. Not only did one get a range of various personalities and personal styles in the new work, but one retained some memory of those commentaries during the wonderful performance of the Elgar which ended the concert. The fact that the older work was providing the structure for the newer one, while the newer one was offering fresh perspectives on aspects of the older, made for a sort of two way conversation which was very satisfying. Between the two Enigma works, and flanking the intermission, there were performances of Vaughan Williams’s ethereal Serenade to Music (unfortunately not in the original version with sixteen soloists) and Brahms’s Song of Destiny in which the orchestra was joined by the BBC Singers and ENO Chorus. All of the playing and singing on the concert was exceptionally beautiful.

Since 1998, the BBC has run concurrently with the Proms a competition for pre-college composers called INSPIRE. The competition itself is the culmination of a whole series of localized events over the year. Each year there is a concert at which the winning works are presented. Over the years there has been some tinkering with exact format, but for some time now the concert, which is performed by the Aurora Orchestra, this year conducted not by its principal conductor, Nicholas Collon, but by Duncan Ward, who is himself a composer and a past winner of the Inspire competition, has contained only the winning works, not the highly commended ones as well. For the last few years, the concert has also included newly commissioned works from the previous year’s winning composers. In this year’s concert, which was given at the BBC Maida Vale Studios on August 13, the winning works were Alien Attack: Opening Sequence by Jacy de Sousa (born 2004), Melodie by Daniel Liu (born 2003), Cycle of the Sun by Madeleine Chassar-Hesketh (born2005), and Humans May Not Apply by Sasha Scott (born 2002). The newly commissioned pieces were Mare Tranquillitatis by Tom Hughes (born 2004), and Ambience by Isabel Wood (born 2000). Another winning work for chorus, Twilight by Helena Paish (born 2002), was performed on the BBC Singers concert on August 17. All of the compositions were on a level of quite impressive skill and maturity, and the playing was on a level that many, as it were, grown-up composers would just about kill to get.

The Late Night Prom on August 13, was billed as a “Late-Night Mixtape”, a “digital detox” whose contents “spanning repertoire from the 16th century to the present day” and dealing with the “the expansive themes of space, life, and death”, “with the rich, sinewy sound of the Northern Indian sarod running through it,” would “calm the mind and nourish the soul.” (In the words of Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know.”). The selection of works included works by Arvo Pärt (Fratres–what else?), Max Richter (Vladimir’s Blues and On the Nature of Daylight), Ëriks Ešenvalds (Stars), Pëteris Vasks (The Fruits of Silence), Ola Gjeilo (The Spheres), Iain Farrington (Morning Song), Soumik Datta (Clouds), and John Taverner (The Lamb), along with works by Chopin, Bach, Lobo, Schubert, and some improvisation, apparently, by Soumik Datta (the sarod player) and Cormac Byrne (percussionist), bridging some of the gaps. The other players were pianist Martin James Bartlett, 12 Ensemble (a string orchestra whose artistic directors are Eloisa-Fleur Thoms and Max Ruisi), joined by the vocal ensemble Tenebrae. All of the new-agie, too cool for school, language was a little off-putting, but in fact most of the pieces (none of which was longer than three or four minutes) were quite good and good to hear, the sequence of them was interesting, the playing and singing was all fabulously beautiful, and, it was…sort of ..soothing….so….

The proms concerts are all available for a month on the BBC Sounds website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007v097.  The INSPIRE concert was recorded for later, date unspecified, broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

One of the themes of this year’s Proms season is the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. As part of this celebration the BBC commissioned Huw Watkins to write The Moon for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales whose Composer-in-Association he has been since 2016. They presented the first performance The Moon, in their Prom concert on August 8. In this performance, conducted by Tadaaki Otaka, they were joined by the BBC National Chorus of Wales and the Philharmonia Chorus. Watkin’s work, setting texts of Shelley, Larkin, and Whitman, begins with the consideration of the moon as an object of wonder observed from the earth, but moves, with a fragment from Whitman about the moon viewing the dead after a battle, to the idea that the moon is an observer of earthly events. In its being a poetic anthology with a structure of seemingly episodic sections that turn out to be part of a tight and compelling overarching form, The Moon is following in a tradition going back to Britten’s Nocturne, and it’s material evokes the sound world of that piece as well. The writing for both chorus and orchestra is always sonorous and skillful. In the hall the lack of clarity of the diction of the chorus was problem, although it was less so in the recording on the BBC website.

The concert opened with a performance of Twill by Twilight by Toru Takemitsu, written in 1988 as a memorial piece for his good friend Morton Feldman. The work had been first presented on the Proms by Tadaaki and this orchestra in 2004. There is speculation that some of the texture of this 13 minute long piece is what the Twill of the title refers to, as well as being a possible allusion to Feldman’s interest in woven carpets. As might be expected, given both the composers involved, the work is meditative and highly non-directional.

The Prom on August 11, presented by The BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Smyon Bychkov opened with the UK premiere of Weites Land (‘Musik mit Brhams” for orchestra) by Detlev Glanert. The piece has a rather traditional shape, involving episodes of ever increasing intensity and speed leading to an explosive climax with a quiet aftermath which has a sense of receding into a distant, ever quieter, infinity. The material is all derived from the first eight notes of the tune of the first movement of the Brahms Fourth Symphony, and Glanert asserts that there are two voices, his (atonal) and Brahms (tonal), at work throughout the piece. Setting aside the question of exactly what “tonal” and “atonal” might mean, the two voices are not terribly clearly differentiated and neither strand of music is particularly distinctive on its own. All of the technical aspects of the work–the writing in and of itself, the writing for instruments, the orchestration, and so on, are pretty much beyond reproach and the trajectory of the shaping of the piece is clear, convincing, and compelling. So it is in a way extremely successful and impressive. For this listener, however, it is also not particularly memorable.

The first half of the concert also contained Glanert’s orchestration of Einsamkeit by Schubert. Schubert’s work, setting a poem by Johann Mayrhofer, is a long–just over twenty minutes–continuous song in six sections, each reflecting a stage of life. Glanert chose to use a Schubert sized orchestra–double winds, horns, trumpets, timpani, and strings–evoking Schubert’s orchestral writing as well. The singer for this work was Christina Gansch. She sounded wonderful. She returned, with a costume change, in the second half, which was the Mahler Fourth Symphony, where she was radiant in the finale.

The Prom on August 6, presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Dalia Stasevska, included, along with the Sibelius Karella Suite and the Tschaikovsky Sixth Symphony, the ‘Cello Concerto of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, the centennial of whose birth in being commemorated by several performances on this year’s Proms. The soloist for the concerto was Sol Gabetta.  Born in Poland, Weinberg, escaped the German occupation by fleeing to Russia. He was a protégé of Shostakovich, and survived the turmoil of the Stalinist purges, including his imprisonment, to live til 1996. The ‘Cello Concerto, written in 1948 but was held back by Weinberg until 1956 when it was re-orchestrated in performed with Rostropvich as the soloist. The work is in four movements. The first wistful melodic movement, is followed by a sort of klezmerish habanera. The third movement is vigorous and folky and features a long brilliant cadenza. The final movement starts vigorously, but returns to the beginning tune and its reflective character.  The performance was eloquent and convincing.

The performances are available for a month on the BBC Sounds website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007v097.

The Proms concert on August 14, which was presented by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, for inexplicable reasons added at the beginning of the concert the Polonaise from Eugene Onegin by Tschaikovsky (possibly because starting with a five minute orchestra piece was better than starting with a concerto?). In any case, the first half of the concert was the Tschaikovsky Violin Concerto, with Lisa Batiashivili, as soloist. The concert ended with The Poem of Ecstasy by Scriabin. The second half of the concert began with the first London performance of Looking for Palestine by David Robert Coleman. Looking for Palestine sets portions of a play by Najla Said which deals with her experiences growing up with a number of different, and in some ways apparently conflicting, identities–Lebanese, Palestinian, Jewish, and American. The part Coleman sets concerns her returning to Palestine in 2006 and inadvertently and inescapably becoming a first hand witness to that year’s war in Lebanon. Later, in New York, just walking down the street, she encounters a protest for Palestinian rights and once more has to confront her own identity and its meaning. Looking for Palestine’s score includes a prominent solo part for Oud (the player of which in this performance was not identified in the program) whose distinctive melodic patterns and microtonal tuning inform the nature of the orchestral writing. There is also a prominent piano part, which was played in this performance by the composer. The soprano soloist, Elsa Dreisig, sang and, sometimes spoke, her wide-ranging and dramatic part with chrystal-clear diction, an always beautiful sound, and great conviction and communication. The piece realizes the dramatic quality of the text with music which is varied, colorful, and equally dramatic and compelling. Its orchestration and the control of its progress are masterly, impressive, and completely convincing. Coleman wrote in his program note that “the piece does not aim to promote an ideological standpoint,” but the presentation of the issue, especially in the very personal context of the text, makes at the very least the implication of an outlook, one that reinforces that evinced by the founding of this orchestra by Barenboim, and its very existence, inescapable.

Arvo Pärt’s music is one of the paradigms of what Tim Rutherford-Johnson calls “spiritual minimalism.” The quality of his music developed from his reaction against both the late Soviet post-Shostakovitch atmosphere of his student years and what might be considered the modernist dogma of the west, as well as for his search for an authentic musical language representing his personal musical inclinations as well as his Estonian heritage. One of the key elements of the language he forged for himself is the technique he calls tintinnabuli, about which he said (in an interview on the BBC in 2000), “Tintinnabuli is the mathematically exact connection from one line to another…..tintinnabuli is the rule where the melody and the accompaniment [accompanying voice]…is one. One and one, it is one – it is not two. This is the secret of this technique.”

Pärt’s Third Symphony, which opened the Prom on August 13, was an important milestone in his development of his personal style. It ended an eight year hiatus in his composition, a result of what he felt was a stylistic impasse, during which he discovered and studied medieval music, particularly that of the Notre-Dame school. It is a three movement piece lasting 25 minutes. It is full of striking sonorities and textures, and it is very expertly and handsomely orchestrated. For this listener there is a frustration with the shaping and continuity of the music, which has a flatness and sameness, resulting from the compositional techniques which he was developing during the composition of this work which finally became tintinnabuli, essentially making no structural difference between the beginning, the middle, and the end of any stretch of music. The results seem to me to be almost unbearably static, as opposed, for instance, to the music of Steve Reich and other minimalist, where the processes are about progress from one point to another. The audience at this concert shared none of my teleological reservations at all; they went wild for it. Popular opinion, I guess, is with this audience. The playing of the Estonian Festival Orchestra, conducted by Paavo Järvi, in the Pärt and in the Sibelius Fifth Symphony, which ended the concert, was vivid and remarkably flexible and subtle and responsive to the music. In the Grieg Piano Concerto, where they were joined by Khatia Buniatishvili, they skirted the edge of death by nuance.

The August 13 installment of the Proms Cadogan Hall series featured percussionist Colin Currie and the JACK Quartet playing two works of Iannis Xenakis framing the first performances of works by Simon Holt and Suzanne Farrin, the latter a BBC Commission. Simon Holt’s Quadriga evokes the image of horses, particularly that of the Roman chariot, drawn by four horses abreast, often depicted in neo-classical statuary. The titles of the four movements are named after elements in classical dressage: levade, croupade, ballotade, and capriole, all among the dressage moves known as ‘airs above the ground.’ Holt’s music, which is lively and engaging, mostly tends to use the string quartet as an expansion or amplification (and sometimes just the accompaniment) of the music of the marimba, which is the predominant instrument in the ensemble until the final movement.

Suzanne Farrin’s Hypersea is, the program note explained, “based on the theory, proposed by palaeontologists Mark McMenamin and Dianna McMenamin, that all life on land is interconnected through on single ‘liquid matrix’ linking plants, fungi, and animals through physical contact and the sharing of fluids: the hypersea.” Farrin commented that she found the composition of works for ensembles which consisted of a single instrument and string quartet to be the most challenging of all. Her solution to that problem in this case, she said, was to make it a string quintet. That seemed to mean that all the instruments, including all the percussion instruments, primarily the vibraphone, were bowed. This certainly put all the instruments in the same, rather alluring, sound world. It was, as a piece, very compelling and extremely successful. The playing in both the Holt and Farrin was masterly and dazzling.

For a long time now, the music of Xenakis has seemed to me to sound, basically, like Greek folk-music, with its poise and furious rhythmic energy and intensity and its strident and fierce melodic and timbral qualities. Whether the elegance, ease, polish, and refinement of the performances of both Rebounds B of 1998 (Currie) and Tetras of 1983 (the JACKs) enhances or militates against those qualities is a question to be considered, but it’s certainly the case that the likes of the them is not likely to be encountered anywhere else at any time by anybody else.

Every year the BBC runs a program which they call INSPIRE, which is a series of workshops and events for young (ages 12-18) composers, culminating in a competition, the works of the winners of which are presented in a concert which is part of the Proms. Over the years this has taken various forms, but in the past few it has been presented by members of the Aurora Orchestra in the Radio Theater in Broadcasting House. This year the concert was presented by Hannah Conway, and conducted by Christopher Stark. The compositions performed were The Weevil’ng by Tom Hughes (14), Amber by Ruby Grace Amar (14), Lower Junior Winners, Daddy Longlegs by Paul Greally (17), Upper Junior Winner, Elegy for Aylan by Alexia Sloane (18), and Inhale. Exhale. by Isabel Hazel Wood (18) Senior Winners. It also included performances of Trallali, Trallaley, Trallalera by Sarah Jenkins and We Soldiers Must March by Rebecca Farthing, works commissioned by the BBC from winners from the 2017 competition, both written in a series of workshops with mentor-composer Martin Suckling “taking inspiration” from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

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.

There are certain concerts where there is a new piece which is clearly not the main item on the program. Sometimes a visiting orchestra will include a work by a composer from its country; sometimes it seems to be more or less an afterthought; sometimes a more integral part of the program, but still not the most important or central part. The earlier Prom on August 30, presented by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo, began with the first UK performance of Liguria by Andrea Tarrodi, which clearly fell into the first category. Liguria commemorates a visit its composer made to the “Cinque Terre,” five villages on the Ligurian coast of Italy. She describes the work as a ‘walking tour’ of them. The work is very attractive; far from the least of its impressive and appealing aspects being the expert and highly polished orchestration; its notes are not at all bad, either. Despite the composer’s description, the work had very little local color. It could just as well, from the sound of it, have been about a place in Sweden. The titles of its six sections, which follow on each other without a break, are generic (Waves, Horizon, Blue Path, Colors, Mountains, Stars), rather than geographically specific. Neither the shaping of the sections nor the articulation of their ends is very clear. The first two or three have the same material, so it’s not easy to follow the progress of the whole work. The character of the music changes at one point, but it’s not completely clear which movement it might be. In the end, Virgil Thomson’s pronouncement on the Egmont Overture could apply to Tarrodi’s Liguria: It was “the classic hors d’oeuvre. Nobody’s digestion was ever spoiled by it and no latecomer has ever lost much by missing it.” In the case of this concert, the main event was Renée Fleming who sang Knoxville: Summer of 1915 by Samuel Barber as well and as movingly as the great recordings by Eleanor Steber and Eileen Farrell. The concert also included the Transformation Scene from Daphne by Stauss, also with Flemming, and the Nielsen Symphony No. 2.

The main event of the Prom presented by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Robin Ticciati was either the magisterial and beautiful performance of the Berg Violin Concerto by Christian Tetzlaff or the Schumann Third Symphony, but it also included the first UK performance of Nocturne–Insomnia by Thomas Larcher. Larcher is a very accomplished, to say the least, composer whose music is polished, meticulously composed, and beautifully heard–every thing about it is completely beyond reproach. This piece does absolutely everything that one would imagine that a piece called Insomnia would do, and does it with great style and expression, but nothing that one might not have thought of. Larcher’s program notes make statements about ‘tonal music,’ ‘the newer tonal music,’ and ‘tonal threads’ as though absolutely everybody knows exactly what he means. The piece itself makes Larcher’s meanings of some of these statements manifest.

Beethoven (Leonora Overture No. 3 and Symphony No. 5) seemed to be the big draw for the completely packed Prom on August 21, which was presented by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, but it also included the Stravinsky Violin Concerto, played with elegance and vigor by Leila Josefowicz, who also played, as an encore, Lachen verlernt by Esa-Pekka Salonen, which is a very snappy and appealing piece, as well as the first performance of Canada! by Gerald Barry, which was a BBC commission, with vocal soloist (both speaking and singing) Allan Clayton.

Clearing security at the Toronto airport on his way back to Dublin where he lives, the text of The Prisoners’ Chorus from Fidelio by Beethoven, came into Barry’s mind (…What joy in the open air! Breathing freely again! Only here is life! Only here!). Those words, in English, French, and German, proceeded by the name Canada! are the bulk of the text of his work, which is, in the orchestra, a sort of frenetic and wacky set of folk dances from some imaginary country (probably not the Canada of real life, but possibly of his imaginary Canada). For a long stretch of the work the word Canada is deconstructed into its component syllables by the soloist and then repeated many times until it has no meaning at all. Finally the members of the orchestra, shouting and then, at the prompting of the soloist, repeating quieter and quieter, join in proclaiming Canada!, finally admonished by the soloist, “Speak softly! We are watched with eyes and ears.” The work is some combination deadpan humor and dead serious earnestness which is compellingly engaging and lingers strongly in the memory. Both Clayton and the orchestra performed the piece meticulously and brilliantly.

On August 26, one of the Proms away from the Albert Hall, was presented at the Bold Tendencies Multi-Storey Car Park, a disused Sainsbury car park (multi-storied) in Peckham which has been transformed into a community arts center, and the home base of The Multi-Story Orchestra. After the opening piece, Granville Bantock’s orchestration of Bach’s chorale prelude on “Wachet auf” BWV645, the orchestra, joined by the Multi-Story Youth Choir, comprised of local young people aged 8-12, in its inaugural performance, presented the first performance of I am I say by Kate Whitley, who with Christopher Stark, the orchestra’s conductor, is one of the founders of the orchestra. I am I say concerns itself with the valuing and protection of the world around us, setting a text by Sabrina Mahfouz with an additional stanza written by the choir. The choir sang clearly and beautifully, with perfect diction, which was not quite equaled by that of the two adult soloists, Ruby Hughes soprano and Michael Sumuel bass-baritone, although they were given music to sing which made clarity of diction a great deal harder to accomplish. Whitley’s music is in a sunny and handsome post-modernish style, and the work was convincing and enjoyable. It was followed by one of founding post-modern, maximal post-minimalist works, Harmonielehre by John Adams. The orchestra’s performance of this very intricate and difficult piece was committed and compelling and benefitted from and added to the sense of occasion and the beautiful sunny day. All the way through the concert there was a noise that also enhanced somehow, rather than distracted from, the performance. After a while I realized that it was the sound of passing trains on the very near tracks.

The late night Prom on August 30 also featured another admirable local orchestra Chineke!, which was founded to provide career opportunities for young Black and Minority Ethnic musicians. The concert opened with the first performance of The Spark Catchers by Hannah Kendall, which was a BBC Commission. The work takes the title of a poem by Lemn Sissay which commemorates an 1888 strike by women who worked in the factory of the Bryant and May Match Company. (The London Olympic Park is on the site of the factory). It follows an arc from a very lively opening, brimming with irregular nervous energy, through a suspended urgent lyric section, which gradually accumulates faster music, and after a return of a good deal of the earlier material combined, has a slightly inconclusive ending. The Spark Catchers is masterly and effective and Chineke! and their conductor, Kevin John Edusel, gave it a polished and convincing performance. The concert also included Lyric for Strings by George Walker, which is a short and very beautiful work. Following programming tradition of earlier days on the Proms, the program included three short pieces featuring the wonderful soprano Jeanine De Bique and two featuring the astounding young ‘cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason; it ended with a performance of Capriccio Espagnol by Rimsky-Korsakov. All the playing by the orchestra was first-rate and the concert was, all the way through, wonderful.

All of these performances are available for listening at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007v097/episodes/player.

Three works on the Proms in August raised issues of authorship and authenticity, among other things. Sir Edward Elgar in the last two years of his life was engaged in the composition of his Third Symphony, which had been encouraged by his friend George Bernard Shaw and commissioned by the BBC. When he died in February of 1934, he left 130 pages of sketches, mostly in short score with few indications of instrumentation, and for many years they were given little attention, and the work considered lost. Anthony Payne, a considerable composer himself, who has had a scholar’s interest in British music of that period, was engaged with the sketches for the Third Symphony starting in 1972, but only in 1993, when he did some work on realizing some of the work for a BBC workshop, did he engage seriously with the project of reconstructing the whole work. In 1996, after some initial resistance, and realizing that the sketches would come into public domain in 2005 anyway, the Elgar family, who controlled the copyright for the sketches, commissioned Payne to do a completion of the work. The completed work, (joining the rank of works such as the Mozart Requiem, completed, and with certain sections composed altogether by Süssmayr), officially called an elaboration, was first performed in 1998. The sketches gave hints of what Elgar’s intentions were for most of the work, but for the last movement, Payne had to more or less compose the bulk of it, and, for that matter, decide what its form was to be (“…I felt that the breadth of the expository material in the sketches pointed towards a sonata form.”). For this listener, the last movement is the least satisfying and, in fact, the least characteristically Elgarian. The orchestration in general seems a little less characteristic than one might expect. I thought at one point in the first movement, feeling that it was a little leaner than it should be, that it in a certain way was a parallel experience to hearing the 1947 version of Petrushka. As with other aspects, whether it might be characteristic of what Elgar might have himself done late in his career is anybody’s guess. In any case, the performance, by the BBC Symphony, conducted by Sakari Oramo, was committed and poetic and was certainly in high Elgarian style. The first half of that concert included Scènes historiques–Suite No. 1 by Sibelius and the Saint Saëns second piano concerto, with soloist Javier Perianes, both very well played, and both leaving me with a feeling that both of those composers were really good.

A different sort of reconstruction was represented by the late night Proms on August 15, presented by The Britten Sinfonia, Anoushka Shankar, Gaurav Mazumdar, Ameen Ali Khan, Nick Able, Ravichandra Kulur, Pirashanna Thevarajah, M. Balachandar, Sanjul Sahal, and Alexa Mason, conducted by Karen Kamensek. They played the first live performance of Passages, a collaboration between Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass from 1990. Recorded in a studio directly to disc, the work had never been given a live performance until this one. Each of the collaborators wrote three of the six tracks on the record, although who wrote which wasn’t specified, either on the album of in the program for this concert. The interview with Karen Kamensek quoted in the program speaks of large chunks of the Shankar movements having been re-barred to facilitate performance with a limited rehearsal schedule. The playing of this clearly rhythmically complex and sophisticated music was, all around, effortless and natural and enormously fluent and expressive. The content, to this listener, seemed negligible, if not non-existent.

The Prom on August 24 was focused on/dedicated to the music of Charles Mingus. It was presented by the Metropole Orkest, conducted by Jules Buckley, joined by Shabaka Hutchings, bass clarinet, Bart van Lier, trombone, Leo Pellegrino, baritone saxophone, Christian Scott, trumpet, and Kandace Springs, vocalist. Since jazz musicians are, as Gunther Schuller said, composing performers, the music even that the same players play will be different from performance to performance, and certainly from one performer, or one group of performers to another. So it is not surprising that the performances of Mingus’s works by a 56 piece orchestra, highly produced, mic’d and mixed, would have a different sound and texture and affect than the original recordings (which were certainly not the same as any other performance by the same performers) by Mingus and his, usually 5-7 associates. The end product of these very very fine players, I think, probably told us more about them and their very very fine playing than about Mingus’s music in any sort of faithful to the original way (achieved by the performance of the Glass/Shankar). In this case, of course, that wasn’t the aim. This is not to take anything away from the quality of the players involved or to disparage their playing in any way, but rather to state a perception, if not a fact. In any case, the playing was fine. It sounded beautiful and it swung. The program listed pieces by Mingus to be played in a certain order. At the beginning, Buckley, announced, very quickly and in an offhand manner that the order was going to be different. The program then proceeded without further commentary, so that if one didn’t know the specific Mingus pieces beforehand, and my guess is even if one did, it was difficult, if not impossible to tell which was which.

A fourth piece, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, which was performed on August 19 by Eva-Maria Westbroek (Tove), Simon O’Neil (Waldemar), Karen Cargil (Wood-Dove), Peter Hoare (Klaus the Fool), Christopher Purves (Peasant), and Thomas Quasthoff (spearker), with the CBSO Chorus, the London Symphony Chorus, Orfeó Català, and the London Symphony Chorus, conducted by Simon Rattle, might be included along with the other three, since, in a certain sense, the Schoenberg who conceived and began the work, in 1901, was not the same Schoenberg who took it up again in 1910 and finished it in 1911, due to the change in his outlook and in the style and character of the music he was writing. In any case the work’s excessiveness, its lusciousness of instrumental sound and harmony, the great craft of its composition, and its singlemindedness in pursuit of its composer’s vision are commonalities in the works of both those Schoenbergs. It is not all that often, due to the length, difficulty, and required forces, that one has a chance to hear Gurrelieder. Any performance of it creates what W. H. Auden called a high holy day of the soul. One as fine and devoted and beautiful as this one raises the level of that attribute even higher.

All of these concerts are available for 30 days after their broadcasts via the BBC Proms website.