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Every year’s Proms has several thematic threads, often celebrating anniversaries and birthdays. This year, no exception, had a large number of performances commemorating the centennials of the births of Benjamin Britten and Witold Lutoslawski, and a bunch of them occurred during the slice of the Proms that I was around for. In the concerts in the Albert Hall Britten was represented by Les Illuminations, performed by Ian Bostridge and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Harding, in their concert on August 20. Les Illuminations sets poems of Rimbaud, a poet whose work was introduced to Britten by W. H. Auden; Britten began it with settings of two poems for Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss, and she sang them at the Queen’s Hall under Henry Wood. Later that year Britten added settings of seven more poems, connected by the refrain “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” [I alone have the key to this savage parade.] Wyss was the soloist for the first complete performance in 1940 in London, but by 1941 the work had become the property of Peter Pears, who sang the first American performance with the CBS Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Britten. Ian Bostridge has become a major performer of a lot of the music that Britten wrote for Pears. He delivered a performance on this concert with a good deal of confidence, even swagger, which is appropriate for this piece. This listener has never warmed up to Les Illumination, or, for that matter, to Bostridge as a performer of Britten’s music, and this performance didn’t change anything. The concert began with a brief fanfare, derived from his oratorio The Mask of Time, by Michael Tippett, which was followed by his Concerto for Double String Orchestra, his earliest work. Britten and Tippet were contemporaries and friends; when the first recording of the piece was made, during the Second World War, while Tippett was imprisoned as a conscientious objector, Britten was the co-producer. (more…)

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The late night Prom presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov on the 19th of August is the kind that is guaranteed to draw an audience whose interest and enthusiasm is in inverse proportion to its size. I think there used to be more of them, but it’s hard to be sure. John White, born in 1936, is a rather legendary figure of one wing of the British avant garde, associated with composers such as Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars, Howard Skepton, Roger Smalley, and Dave Smith, as well as Michael Finnissy. He is best known for his piano sonatas, of which there at least 200. People who know his music are devoted to it, but it rarely gets played. This performance of his Chord-Breaking Machine from 1971 was the first one I’ve encountered. The piece involves short rhythmic patters repeated at different rates in the winds and strings, while the brass sustain the harmonies produced thereby, against conflicting rhythmic patters in the percussion. The process as set up blurs the edges of the boundaries of the movement in time from one harmony and the next. It’s really an early minimalist process piece dating from a time before the genre had been conclusively named. This was a very good example of it, with lots of energy, and it was enjoyable and interesting, although it seemed a bit short. (more…)

On the Proms Chamber Music concert at Cadogan Hall on Monday, August 12, the women of the BBC Singers, along with flute player Philippa Davies and harpists Lucy Wakeford, Helen Tunstall, and Hugh Webb, of the Nash Ensemble conducted by Nicholas Kok, performed the UK premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s The Moth Requiem. During the short interview before the performance, Birwistle said that as a young man he had had an interest in natural history, and was particularly interested in moths. Moths, he said, have a bad reputation because “they eat your cashmere,” going on to say that of the more than a thousand species of moths, only two eat cashmere. He sees the moths as emblematic of thing which are disappearing, both in the world, and in his life. “A lot of people seem to be going from my life,” he said, “and soon I’ll be going.” He wanted to write a piece which dealt with that, but he didn’t want to write anything morbid or sugary; he wanted it to have some idea of the anger he feels about it all.

Like Ravel in Daphnis and Chloe and Vaughan Williams in Flos Campi, Birtwistle uses the chorus instrumentally. Unlike those other composers, he gives them words to sings, although making it clear from the beginning that the perception of those words is not the point. The text of The Moth Requiem is the Latin names of twelve extinct species of moths, along with a poem by Robin Blaser, who (more…)

Mark Anthony Turnage’s Frieze, performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, on August 11, and Nashit Kahn’s The Gate of the Moon, a concerto for sitar and orchestra, performed by Kahn himself with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Antherton, on August 12, both raise the question of how one in a new piece can meaningfully reference other music. Turnage’s work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society to celebrate the organization’s bicentennial and to be on the same program with their most famous and, probably, greatest commission, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony; this shorter work which is clearly modeled on the Beethoven in its general layout, is a sort of gloss in his own language on the older one. Kahn’s Concerto joins an orchestra of western instruments and a single Indian one and aims at joining their indigenous musical languages in a meaningful way as well. (more…)