Well, I did....

….give the Last Night of the Proms ‘a last chance’ (see August 18). I was both curious to see how the rather strange programme would go, and nostalgic for the event I suppose. But also because Mark Elder was the conductor, and together with many others I have a very high opinion of his capabilities. He has brought Manchester’s Halle Orchestra back to its previous glory and because of the time and attention he gives to the orchestra, reminded people of the golden Barbirolli years. He certainly conducted this rather odd programme with springing rhythms and precise playing of a quality not always typical of last night performances. The familiar Fantasia on British Sea Songs was beautiful and not just a crowd-pleaser. This year the five ‘Proms in the Park’ venues in London, Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester and Swansea were linked with the Albert Hall by satellite, responding to the trumpet calls that begin the Fantasia as well as an inter-play of regional folk songs by choirs in each of the parks.

Elder made the usual speech near to the end of the three hour concert and courted the familiar danger of taking too long over it. When you are addressing the world I suppose the temptation is almost irresistible to speak at length. He saved himself however by being serious with the audience about two matters. One was political. He complained that musicians were being prevented from performing because under new security measures they were prevented from taking their instruments on planes as hand luggage. (I had heard the violinist Joshua Bell say on Thursday evening that as soon as his performance of Bruch’s Concerto was over his assistant had had to take his violin and catch a train with it to Munich so that there he could perform on it the next day.) And then Elder spoke enthusiastically about singing and how schools and choirs everywhere should rejoice in the human voice.

And the music? At the risk of playing the critic again, the first half of the Concert didn’t work for me at all. It was a strange hotchpotch of Russian, Italian, British and German music which though performed superbly by Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Victoria Mullova and the BBC Symphony at its best, had no sense of continuity and unexpectedly one was left longing for the second half.

That was fine and although I dreaded the unrealistic jingoism of ‘Rule Britannia’, this year it was sung entirely by the choir in a beautiful new arrangement and without the ‘star turn’ of a soloist we have come to expect. The usual array of Union Jacks in the audience were complemented by the flags of many other nations as well, which was fine. Parry’s setting of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ in Elgar’s arrangement, was a good ending for us, and we switched off the TV before the National Anthem and Auld Lang Syne and went to bed, happily looking forward to the 113th. Season 2007!

B.R.

More about 'The Critics'

I sometimes think when I read a critic’s negative comment about a concert or any other art form, ‘could you do better’? There can be an Olympian detachment and superiority in the opinions of such people. And even a vendetta. The chief musical critic of The Guardian for example could be relied upon to disapprove of any performance conducted by Leonard Slatkin, the previous conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Similarly the critics gave the Austrian Franz Welser-Most a difficult time of it when he was conductor of the London Philharmonic, but in this case disapproval came from his orchestra as well; they nick-named him ‘Frankly Worst than Most’ (He has had a much better time since with many well reviewed recordings to his name, as Director of the Zurich Opera and in his present tenure as Chief Conductor of the prestigious Cleveland Orchestra.)

I watched the two Simon Rattle and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra relays from the Albert Hall last week, and there are criticisms of them in our paper this morning. The big work of the two concerts was Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. Tim Ashley approved of a ‘performance of great splendour’ but added that ‘some of the phrases sounded over-sculptured’, the ‘tempi too calculated, the pauses and echoes too adroitly managed’. I agree with that and hearing Rattle conduct in Amsterdam, London and Birmingham on several occasions, have often felt that everything was so well prepared – characterised by enormous climaxes and almost silent pianissimos – that the danger of a live event was perhaps missing. But the glamour, exuberance and sense of occasion of a concert conducted by Simon Rattle will always be irresistible!

Eduard Hanslick(1825-1904), was widely respected as the author of a book called ‘The Beauty of Music’ , as a lecturer in the history of music at Vienna University and as the foremost music critic of his day. He was at the centre of the great argument about the ‘new’ music of Wagner and the more classical work of Brahms and Schumann. Although impressed by Wagner’s earlier works Hanslick became hostile to him and therefore to Bruckner, for whom Wagner was almost a god; certainly a friend and mentor. He made the composer deeply unhappy, robbing him of what little confidence he had.

So, musical criticism may be a necessary exercise, but ultimately it is a fallible one. Even with a breadth of musical knowledge that I envy, perhaps ‘The Critics’ are telling us what they do or don’t like about a composition or a performance, and therefore, in the end, they are just like us.

B.R.

Bruckner at the Proms

Of the three Proms I booked up for this year, I was only able to go to two, the second on Thursday of this week. The main work was Bruckner’s last symphony, only three movements of which were finished before he died (see my posting on 24/10/05). Apparently there were sketches everywhere in his house for the final movement -which was to be his great paean of praise for his ‘dear’ God- and these were mainly stolen by various people before anyone could try and piece them together for at least a performing version of the whole work.

As it is the symphony is over an hour long and full of the astonishing climaxes and moments of still beauty that are so characteristic of his symphonies. The BBC Symphony Orchestra was under its newly appointed Chief Conductor, Jiri Belohlavek on Thursday , and I and my concert companion agreed that it was a powerful and lyrical performance by the ever improving BBC orchestra and its Czech conductor. A critic in The Guardian this morning thought otherwise. George Hall complains that Belohlavek was unable to ‘realise the composer’s vast structures’ and as a result the work was ‘ a piecemeal affair, it’s local highlights registering impressively but only rarely connecting up into larger spans’. I don’t agree. Surely everyone recognises that it was the composer who had the problem of unified structure, which was one reason why he was always revising his work. The Prom programme note by Stephen Johnson says as much. ‘There are so many themes, so many changes of direction’; that they seem ‘baffling’, he writes. Mr Hall seems to have cracked what many others find hard to solve.

However, the Guardian critic concedes ‘that the orchestra acquitted itself well over more than an hour of intense music-making’. And so it did. The Adagio movement was an astonishing experience, leading to its terrifying dissonant climax, followed by the calm quietness that ends the work so that it felt like a parting benediction by a composer dedicated to his art and to his deep Christian beliefs.

Tonight Simon Rattle is conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. It will be interesting to see what critics make of it, for some of them seem a little unforgiving of Rattle’s flight to Berlin. I shall be watching on TV and will try to avoid the frenetic trivialities of the presenters who, this year have been such a pain (we are even introduced to ‘interesting’ celebrities in the audience during the intervals).

B.R.