MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Guest contribution from writer Tom Luce:

The 2023 edition of the BBC Proms offered 84 concerts — 72 at the Royal Albert Hall and 6 across the UK — over eight weeks, concluding with the Last Night event on 6 September.

All of these performances are now available online on BBC Sounds until 8 October. The BBC Promenade Festival each summer is justifiably recognized as one of the world’s finest concert festivals, and the 2023 program was probably the most astounding in recent years. 

All of the concerts are worth experiencing, but there are some which, in my view, should have special priority. Of course, the opening and closing nights are imbued with special drama and communal music, as the audience becomes involved with the performers, sometimes joining in to sing. 

Two other concerts also included some singing from the audience in addition to applause. One was a Sunday program given twice, in the morning and afternoon of 22 July, by the English National Opera. It was designed as an introduction to opera for the many children brought to the concert hall by their families, and also to amuse them. Actors played the roles of Mozart and Verdi, for example, explaining their achievements, while soloists, chorus, and orchestra performed parts of some of their operas. The program’s title was Horrible Histories: Orrible Opera, and it brilliantly exemplified opera’s capacity  to convey social and political conflicts that complicate personal love relationships. A closing event presented a musical listing of British Monarchs over the last 1,000 years, in which all audience members were encouraged to join their voices, presumably to convince the attending children of the value of knowing British monarchical history following this year’s coronation, though it seemed that almost as many of us adults as the children couldn’t fully remember the long list.

Another was the outstanding concert, from memory, by all players in the Aurora Orchestra, who are widely admired for performing classical music without instrumental stands or parts. The work was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, performed twice, on the afternoon and the evening of 2 September. The concert’s opening half presented an illustrative introduction to the work led by an actor representing the composer, with key examples of the music played by the orchestra. For a couple of moments of interesting harmony and rhythm, we in the audience were asked to join in: quite a lot us tried, but probably thousands of times less convincingly than the brilliant Aurora experts.

Amongst the other concerts to look for online, I would especially recommend a fine solo organ performance given on 26 August by the Canadian organist Isabelle Demers, who opened with her own powerful and effective organ arrangement of Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger. Also fascinating is a performance of Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri , a fine but rarely heard oratorio, by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. He also led the LSO on 27 August in a superb interpretation of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony prefaced by Figure humaine, a fascinating choral cantata by Francis Poulenc expressing solidarity with the Nazi-occupied French Resistance during the Second World War; it was sung by the admired BBC Singers. 

Other recommendations include: a splendid performance on 29 July of Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus and soloists an English translation; William Walton’s powerful and dramatic Belshazzar’s Feast by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus on 4 August by, which was preceded by Yuja Wang’s magnificent rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the European premiere of Jimmy López Bellido’s Perú Negro, a vibrant homage to Afro-Peruvian music;  a Budapest Festival Orchestra program on 12 August led by Iván Fischer, which included a wonderful account by Sir András Schiff of Schumann’s Piano Concerto as well as Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony; the same pianist on the following day in Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto, and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony; the Boston Symphony conducted by Andris Nelsons on 26 August, performing Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Gershwin’s Concerto in F;  and, in an astounding and rare appearance in the concert hall, a performance of Berlioz’s complete opera Les Troyens by the Monteverdi Choir, a cast of brilliant soloists, and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique founded by Sir John Eliot Gardiner but, after he pulled out of the Proms, brilliantly conducted by his assistant Dinis Sousa, who filled in. Also  rarely seen in opera houses because of its difficulty and expense, Berlioz’s hugely passionate and exciting stage epic is a tremendously powerful example of how opera uses social and political conflicts to complicate personal relationships — a point that had previously been made in the special concert of 22 July for children and family audiences. This account of Les Troyens in particular should not be missed.

Also worth mentioning is that, in most countries, some of the live Proms recordings appear on YouTube not only in audio but also in video, conveying the dramatic public enthusiasm expressed by the gigantic Proms audiences — as at the Last Night of the Proms.

–Tom Luce

Filed under: BBC Proms, music news