Sequenza21

One of the focuses of this year’s Proms, concentrated during the month of August, was the centennial of György Ligeti. The first of these, presented on August 11 by The London Philharmonic Orchestra, along with the London Philharmonic Choir, the Royal Northern College of Music Chamber Choir, and the Edvard Grieg Kor, conducted by Edward Gardner, started in what might be the most obvious place, especially for drawing a large audience, focusing on the music used in Stanley Kurbrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The movie certainly introduced Liget’s music to a larger audience than it had ever received before that time, and made him a sort of star, both of in new music circles and in the world at large. This concert included Ligeti’s Requiem and Lux Aeterna, and ended, inevitably, with Also sprach Zarathrustra by Richard Strauss. Robert Stein’s program note asserted that Ligeti’s Requiem, composed from 1963 to 1965, was an unexpected next piece to follow his Poèm symphonique, for 100 metronomes, of 1962, but in fact the micropolyphony of the choral and orchestra work is a pretty exact recreation of the texture produced by many metronomes clicking away simultaneously. In the Requiem, Ligeti aligns that micropolyphonic texture with a quite remarkable and highly personal sense of register and orchestral color, producing a new and striking musical character at just about every moment. The Lux Aeterna, for 16-part unaccompanied chorus, written in 1966, which was performed by the Edvard Grieg Kor, is more concentrated and refined, and even more striking, being a distillation and, if you like, condensation of the Requiem for sixteen unaccompanied voices. All of the performances were beyond reproach.

The Prom on August 15, presented by the Royal Philharmonic, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, started with Lotano by Ligeti. Written in 1967, Lotano is in the vein of the Requiem and Lux Aeterna, but concentrates on luminous orchestration. Lontano was followed by the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto, with Alexandre Kantorow, as soloist, in what seemed to me to be the best performance of anything I’d ever heard, Kantorow, as an encore, delivered a radiant performance of somebody’s arrangement of the Finale from The Firebird. The concert ended with the Shostakovich Tenth Symphony, written in 1953. Shostakovich had suffered serious humiliation and oppression during the later 1940s and early 1950, a certain amount of it aimed directly at him by Stalin. During that time he wrote a number of pieces which he simply didn’t release, realizing that they would cause him even more trouble. Stalin’s death in March of 1953 was a source of relief for the composer, and the Symphony seems to be a powerful expression both of that relief and its attendant relative freedom, as well as a reflection on aspects of the situation. The second movement, which is a relentless and caustic scherzo is said to be a portrait of Stalin. The performance of the piece was vivid and powerful. The whole concert was unforgettable.

The Prom on the evening of August 13 was presented by The Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted by Iván Fischer, on the heels of their Audience Choice Proms that afternoon, in which the audience chose the program by vote as it went along, working from a menu provided to them. The evening began with Mysteries of the Macabre by Ligeti, an excerpt from his opera Le Grand Macabre, consisting of an aria for the Chief of the Secret Political Police, arranged by Elgar Howarth. The soloist for this was Anna-Lena Elbert, who, as was appropriate to the music it dramatic situation in the opera, was all over the stage, in a manner just as frenetic as the music she was singing. She was singing in German, but the text came think and fast and relentlessly, so one wasn’t able to actually get any words at all, which didn’t in any way detract from the absurd and funny effect of the piece. This was followed by Béla Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto, with Sir András Schiff as soloist. It received a lovely and heartfelt performance, as was appropriate to the valedictory nature of the piece. The concert concluded with the Beethoven Third Symphony. The playing all the way through the concert was as good as one could have ever expected.

The impression that Ligeti was presented only as the composer of his modernist, micropolyphonic, Space Odyssey music was rectified by the Prom on August 20, presented by Les Sièles and its conductor François-Xavier Roth. This concert included the Concert Românesc, representing the highly polished Bartokian music, infused with folk-like material, that Ligeti wrote before he fled Hungary for the west in 1956 and the Violin Concerto of 1989-93, with soloist Isabelle Faust, which gave full evidence of the highly multifaceted, multisourced and, at least for this listener, more fully satisfying music that he was writing toward the end of his life. The character of the two works and the progress and shape of each, are not dissimilar, even though the later piece is freer in its incorporation of different tunings and more ‘exotic’ instruments, such as ocarina and swanee whistles. It conveys the sense of Ligeti as a continually inquiring and endlessly curious musical personality. Les Siècles specializes in playing instruments and tunings appropriate to the particular repertory they are performing, so the Ligeti pieces on the first half of the concert were performed on modern instruments tuned to A=442Hz; the Mozart works on the second half of the concert, the 23rd Piano Concerto, with soloist Aleander Melnikov, and the 41st Symphony, were performed on Classical-period instruments tuned to A=430Hz.

All of these concerts can be heard on the BBC Sounds website.

The late night Prom on August 9, was billed as Mindful Mix Prom. It was presented by Ola Gjello, along with Ruby Aspinall, the Carducci String Quartet, and VOCES8. It was a little difficult initially for one to know exactly what one was in store for. The advanced material invited one to “relax into a late night musical meditation” which would explore “the universal, timeless themes of night, stillness and prayer through the lens of composers old and new,” with a playlist that “drifts from Renaissance to Radiohead.” In a Proms program for an earlier concert, Tom Service’s “The Proms Listening Service” had promised “carefully curated music designed to put us in a hypnotic nocturnal reverie.” Among the composers listed in this Prom’s program, aside from Gjello, were Caroline Shaw, Philip Glass, Roxanna Panufnik (with a work commissioned by the BBC for this concert), Ken Burton, Jake Runestad, Eric Whitacre, and Samuel Barber–also William Byrd. The program advised that the listed order was subject to change and that there would be improvisations by Gjello interspersed among the other works. Since the approximately hour and fifteen minutes duration of Prom was filled with continuous music and the program said that the order listed was not necessarily the order in which works would be performed, it was difficult to tell exactly what one was hearing at any one point of the performance. There were hints, of course: For instance Caroline Shaw’s piece and the swallows was presented with “a new violin solo by Christopher Moore.” So when there was a violinist standing in the midst of the singers, one could have probably safely assume that one was hearing the Shaw (the program did not list the names of the members of the Carducci Quartet, so one might have assumed that Chistopher Moore was the person playing–in fact it was Matthew Denton, the quartet’s first violinist–that information the product of later research). The harpist, Ruby Aspinall, played only in one piece near the end; that might have been the Panufnik’s Floral Tribute, setting a poem by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II (just guessing, since maybe the fact that it was the commissioned piece would justify bringing in one player for only that piece). It was clear that the end of the program was the Barber, the choral version of Adagio for Strings as an Agnus Dei, which was played by the Carduccis and sung by VOCES8. There was also, over the whole length of the performance, a rather elaborate light show, which this listener did not find soothing, since it made the program hard to read and made it even more difficult to figure out where one might have been in the program. The answer provided by the evidence of the concert to the question “what is mindful mix” though was, apparently, “easy listening.”

Despite complaints, it was clear immediately and through the duration that the playing and singing was really first class and really beautiful and one could be very mindful of and thankful for that.

The Prom on August 8 was presented by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the London Symphony Chorus upper voices, conducted by Jaime Martin. The major work on the first half of the concert was the Violin Concerto by Grace Williams, with soloist Geneva Lewis, which was receiving its first Proms performance. The work is in three movements and last about half an hour. It is filled with rhapsodic music which features very clear and compelling long lines. Its orchestration is clear and rich and varied, and the writing for the soloist is very effective. Its tempo and texture over the three movements, though, is very unvaried, so that, in the end, there’s very little differentiation at all, and this listener, anyway, was unable to remember any point in the piece more than any other point, or follow any sort of argument, despite the beauty and effectiveness of any one of the moments. It was preceded in the concert by an Overture, written in 1919 by Dora Pejačević, a composer I’d never heard of before, who is being featured on this year’s Proms, in observance of the centennial of her death. A member of the Hungarian and Croatian aristocracy, Pejačević, according to the program “resolutely rejected an easy path for herself” and pursed a career as a composer (she is said to be the first Croatian composer to write a piano concerto). The overture is lively and appealing and makes one eager to hear more or her music. The language and orchestration are not too far away from that of Holst’s The Planets, written two years earlier, which was the second half of the concert. The audience, which packed out the house, was clearly there for the Holst, and they applauded and cheered loudly and lustily and long after every movement. There was some good reason for this, as the performance was tremendous, as were the performance of the other two pieces.

These Proms and all the others can be heard at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m001nh6k