10/9/10, Royal Albert Hall
1 hr 30 mins. Late-night Prom featuring the new incarnation of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, fronted by Arthur Jeffes, son of the original's founder-composer, Simon Jeffes. An 11-piece, joined by Kathryn Tickell (on both Northumbrian small pipes and fiddle), playing lots of Simon Jeffes' tunes and a handful of Arthur's, including a solo piano piece he wrote for his father's memorial service (SJ died in 1997) which he played as an encore.
Most of the old favourites were there, and they haven't lost their catchiness. We had Music for a Found Harmonium, Perpetuum Mobile, Giles Farnaby's Dream, Telephone and Rubber Band, all of which we have on disc at home. Plus some I didn't know like Organum (on which Tickell played the pipes) and Swing the Cat (in which she joined in some very fast fiddle ensemble playing, folk-style, much better in this performance than in a recording we've heard).
The line-up is very different from the original, which only had one ukelele (not three on occasions), didn't have a double bass, did have a trombone etc etc. This had two percussionists and Jeffes on piano, with only one guitarist. It meant the sound had a very different texture, and crucially was poorly served in the hall by the mix (it might have been different for listeners at home...). To begin with we could hardly hear the cello and the other strings, and though it got better it still wasn't entirely satisfactory.
Also Arthur's pieces (with the exception of the piano solo) aren't in the same league as his dad's, while some of the slower pieces had me drifting off (it was late night...)
All the musicians were pretty straight with the exception of one of the violinists who wore black plus-fours or jodhpurs and a black top hat and pranced around centre stage in a very "look at me" kind of way.
I'm glad we went but I think we'll stick to recordings of the original in future.
Showing posts with label albert hall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label albert hall. Show all posts
Friday, 10 September 2010
Monday, 6 September 2010
HENRY WOOD PROM
5/8/10, Royal Albert Hall
2 hrs 20 mins. Ulster Orchestra with Paul Watkins and pianist Stephen Osborne. Orchestra all in black except for Watkins in a lounge suit with white shirt and tie. A good night for the brass, with fanfares and marches galore. But the hall very empty, despite the crowd-pleasing nature of the programme, perhaps because there'd been a free Prom all afternoon recreating (with the addition of a 2010 world premiere BBC commission!) the last night of Henry Wood's 1910 Proms. The arena in particular very sparsely filled. This programme all works which had been premiered (or at least introduced to British audiences) by Henry Wood at the Proms.
There was a fanfare by Arnold Bax (or Sir Arthur Bliss?) written for Henry Wood's 70th birthday in 1944, noisy and brassy, and then A London Pageant by Bliss (or Bax?). It's a piece of light music really, a march, very silly. It comes to a crashing brass climax twice, only for the violins to keep going underneath very quietly; there's a discordant shift to the minor halfway through but it doesn't last, it's purely for effect. At the end there's an enormous climax with all the brass, the kitchen sink and the Albert Hall organ (the organist was wearing ear defenders)! It made me laugh. The string sound very English (ie sub-Elgar).
Then we had Dorothy Howell's Lamia, premiered in 1919 when she was 21. I'd never heard of her. She lived until 1982, dying at the age of 84 after a blameless life teaching at the Royal Academy of Music. So why, on the evidence of this, did she not compose more? It starts very softly and discordantly with just two flutes. It ends very softly on a dying fall played by the strings, just after a rather haunting solo by the leader. In between some lovely string music and colourful orchestration, plus the odd melody. Passed 12 minutes very agreeably.
Then Osborne played Rachmaninov's first piano concerto. I don't know this, but I suspect it was a rather spiky interpretation of the slow movement, which I'm sure is supposed to be lusher and more tuneful than the version Osborne gave us. The slow movement is also very short, but then the final movement has a crashing false start followed by a thoughtful piano solo before the finale proper starts, so you get two slow movements in effect. D liked it very much. Osborne played with a score and a blonde page-turner: the first time I've seen a soloist using a score in a piece from the core repertoire.
Part 2 started with Sibelius's Karelia Suite. Not as driven as some performances I've heard, but in the finale there were numerous swoops and twiddly bits from the horns and the brass I've never been aware of in recorded or broadcast performances. One quiet bit was ruined by coughing.
Parry's Symphonic Suite was inoffensive and rose to a suitable climax (brass-heavy, of course, and rather Elgarian) but my quota of concentration available for unfamiliar music was exhausted.
Then Tchaikovsky's waltz and march from Eugene Onegin. Familiar, tuneful, noisy: what's not to like? (Hard to credit that this was "new music" in Henry Wood's time.)
The Prommers may have hoped for an encore, but Watkins marched on after two or three curtain calls, looked pointedly at his watch and dragged the leader off.
2 hrs 20 mins. Ulster Orchestra with Paul Watkins and pianist Stephen Osborne. Orchestra all in black except for Watkins in a lounge suit with white shirt and tie. A good night for the brass, with fanfares and marches galore. But the hall very empty, despite the crowd-pleasing nature of the programme, perhaps because there'd been a free Prom all afternoon recreating (with the addition of a 2010 world premiere BBC commission!) the last night of Henry Wood's 1910 Proms. The arena in particular very sparsely filled. This programme all works which had been premiered (or at least introduced to British audiences) by Henry Wood at the Proms.
There was a fanfare by Arnold Bax (or Sir Arthur Bliss?) written for Henry Wood's 70th birthday in 1944, noisy and brassy, and then A London Pageant by Bliss (or Bax?). It's a piece of light music really, a march, very silly. It comes to a crashing brass climax twice, only for the violins to keep going underneath very quietly; there's a discordant shift to the minor halfway through but it doesn't last, it's purely for effect. At the end there's an enormous climax with all the brass, the kitchen sink and the Albert Hall organ (the organist was wearing ear defenders)! It made me laugh. The string sound very English (ie sub-Elgar).
Then we had Dorothy Howell's Lamia, premiered in 1919 when she was 21. I'd never heard of her. She lived until 1982, dying at the age of 84 after a blameless life teaching at the Royal Academy of Music. So why, on the evidence of this, did she not compose more? It starts very softly and discordantly with just two flutes. It ends very softly on a dying fall played by the strings, just after a rather haunting solo by the leader. In between some lovely string music and colourful orchestration, plus the odd melody. Passed 12 minutes very agreeably.
Then Osborne played Rachmaninov's first piano concerto. I don't know this, but I suspect it was a rather spiky interpretation of the slow movement, which I'm sure is supposed to be lusher and more tuneful than the version Osborne gave us. The slow movement is also very short, but then the final movement has a crashing false start followed by a thoughtful piano solo before the finale proper starts, so you get two slow movements in effect. D liked it very much. Osborne played with a score and a blonde page-turner: the first time I've seen a soloist using a score in a piece from the core repertoire.
Part 2 started with Sibelius's Karelia Suite. Not as driven as some performances I've heard, but in the finale there were numerous swoops and twiddly bits from the horns and the brass I've never been aware of in recorded or broadcast performances. One quiet bit was ruined by coughing.
Parry's Symphonic Suite was inoffensive and rose to a suitable climax (brass-heavy, of course, and rather Elgarian) but my quota of concentration available for unfamiliar music was exhausted.
Then Tchaikovsky's waltz and march from Eugene Onegin. Familiar, tuneful, noisy: what's not to like? (Hard to credit that this was "new music" in Henry Wood's time.)
The Prommers may have hoped for an encore, but Watkins marched on after two or three curtain calls, looked pointedly at his watch and dragged the leader off.
Sunday, 22 August 2010
PROM
21/8/10, Royal Albert Hall
2hrs 15 mins. Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra under Yannick Nezet-Seguin. Wagner's Tannhauser overture, Mahler's Ruckert-Lieder and Beethoven's Third Symphony (the Eroica).
The Wagner stirring at the start but lacked the frisson at the end. Perhaps he took it a bit too slowly. Perhaps the brass (three trombones, three trumpets, tuba) just weren't loud enough. But wonderful stuff nonetheless. I always feel guilty liking Wagner: it's like listening to chocolate ice cream. He makes it all too easy...
The singer in the Mahler was baritone Simon Keenlyside, in white tie like the band (M Nezet-Seguin, on the other hand, was in a suit with a black T-shirt). We didn't know these songs and foolishly didn't buy a programme until the interval so we were a trifle at sea. Settings of poems by Friederich Ruckert (b 1788), whose portrait in the programme (shoulder length dark curls, open-collared white shirt, firm chin, dark eyes under darker brows) positively shrieks "Romantic poet". He also wrote the Kindertotenlieder.
Five songs, not written as a sequence and in one case not even orchestrated by Mahler himself, who left just a piano setting. In the order we heard them the first two were broadly positive: one is about the fragrance of lime, the other, "Blicke mir nick in die Lieder" or "Look not at my songs", is a coy little number about not looking over the poet's shoulder until he's finished. The best was the third, "Um mitternach", which was also the longest and for the most part scored just for the voice and the woodwind, except that at the end the brass come in (the only one of the songs in which they do), until a coda for the strings in which the whole thing fades beautifully away to a silence. Just before it did some philistine coughed loudly.
Both the Wagner and the Mahler started very quietly and Nezet-Seguin gave us plenty of time to settle. The Beethoven starts with a pair of emphatic notes from virtually the entire orchestra and they were playing the moment he was on the podium and before the applause fell away (D was leaning over to me and had just started to whisper something). Commendable urgency, but it couldn't keep me awake. It's been a very tiring couple of weeks. It's familiar stuff, very splendid, and must have been staggering when first composed, but it's 50 minutes long and I did feel, especially in the first movement, that he goes on a bit. The audience of course loved it.
Saturday, 21 August 2010
PROM
19/8/10, Royal Albert Hall
3 hrs. The BBC Scottish Symphony with Martyn Brabbins and a Mozart overture, Liszt piano concerto, Sheherazade, then after the interview an unlistenable new work by James Dillon and Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony. I was knackered and it was a long concert, so the second half was a bit of a blur.
The Mozart (Der Schauspieldirektor) was short, polite and inoffensive. The Liszt was played by Boris Giltburg, replacing Boris Berezovsky for "contractual reasons", whatever that means (a row about the fee? double booking?). It's a serious work but for the first two movements piano and orchestra could have been playing separate pieces. The pianist delivers himself of a great tract of noisy, dramatic, flamboyant, romantic angst; the orchestra plays a few notes; the soloist starts up again while the orchestra rests its instruments and watches. There's more integration, more dialogue in the third movement, but overall the impression was unsatisfactory. Yet the Prommers loved the soloist, who was brought back for a (lengthy) encore.
Sherehezade is long too. I'd forgotten how long, even though it's almost tediously familiar thanks to an Ann Rachlin tape we used to play in the car when the kids were young. But it is marvellous, colourful stuff with great tunes and orchestral effects (and hearing a work in live performance with whoch you're already familiar is usually more a help than a hindrance because it enables you to spot differences in interpretation and emphasis). Half the orchestra seemed to be employed as soloists at one point or another. The "Sheherezade" passages for solo violin and harp and the woodwind solos were particularly attractive. And it boasted six percussionists. It also had a third trumpeter who sat mute throughout the first two movements and only raised his instrument briefly in the third, much to our relief (D nudged me to make sure I didn't miss it: he'd become a positive distraction).
The Dillon (called La Navette) was a long drone involving at times the whole orchestra, with the usual cliches: sudden brief eruptions from the brass; little twiddly bits, equally sudden, equally arbitrary, from the woodwind; every conceivable type of percussion.
The Tchaikovsky (which we didn't know) was enjoyable and accessible and culminated in a typical Tchaikobsky march which he flogged to death, typically, repeating it over and over until it threatened to become a pain.
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
RUSSIAN PROM
15/8/10, Royal Albert Hall
London Philharmonic Orchestra with Vladimir Jurowski. The Musorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov Night on the Bare Mountain; Shostakovich Violin Concerto No1 with Julia Fischer; Scrabin's Reverie (very short, very slight); Prokofiev's Symphony No 3.
The Musorgsky was thrilling. Lots of orchestral colour. The Shostakovich was spectacular, exciting, impassioned, tortured; the third movement ends with a cadenza which seemed to go on for ever. Ms Fischer went down an absolute storm with the Prommers and was brought back for an encore.
The Prokofiev not really to my taste (I do try, really I do, but it always sounds like under-developed film music). And my concentration goes late in the evening.
Friday, 4 September 2009
VARIOUS PROMS
25/8/09 and 1/9/09, Royal Albert Hall (Proms)
25/8/09
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Roger Norrington with Joyce DiDonato singing; in the second half they played Mendelssohn's Symphony No 3, the Scottish.
I failed to make proper notes at the time but I did scribble in the programme. We had Purcell's suite from the incidental music to Abdelazer, and then La DiDonato came on in a green, full-skirted strapless dress to sing Ombra mai fu from Xerxes and Ah mio cor from Alcina. The former was funereal, though she sounded gorgeous. The second was much better, faster, and there was something she did at the segue into the middle section unaccompanied when her voice soared and fell and changed key and all sorts, and we all held our breath.
And then we had Handel's Water Music, which is too familiar and I fell asleep.
And that was followed by our Joyce back for Haydn's Scena di Berenice which is a splendidly dramatic concert aria. She was great: lyrical, highly dramatic, thrillingly low at times.
The Mendelssohn contrasts light and dark in the first movement (the Scots weather?), first brassy, then flute and clarinet. There are lovely melodies in the third movement. And a bouncy finish.
G didn't like Norrington: he thinks he's a show-off, turning to the audience at the end and bouncing like a schoolboy.
1/9/09
Royal Concertgebouw with Mariss Janson doing Haydn's Symphony No 100, the Military, and Shostakovich's Symphony No 10.
I failed to make a note at the time and remember nothing of it.
The reviews below help bring some of it back, notably the four percussionists marching on at the end of the Haydn.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/6126100/BBC-Proms-Mariss-Jansons-and-the-Royal-Concertgebouw-Orchestra.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/06/bbc-proms-classical-music-review-maddocks
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b2f6ada-98aa-11de-aa1b-00144feabdc0.html
1/9/09
Late-night Prom with the Michael Nyman Band.
Initially riveting: loud, repetitive, rhythmic with a spectacular sense of impetus and drive. Think Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds, the theme tune from The Draughtsman's Contract.
The trouble is, they all sound like that: same minimalist techniques, same (amplified) instrumentation.
Alas it became boring in the end
25/8/09
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Roger Norrington with Joyce DiDonato singing; in the second half they played Mendelssohn's Symphony No 3, the Scottish.
I failed to make proper notes at the time but I did scribble in the programme. We had Purcell's suite from the incidental music to Abdelazer, and then La DiDonato came on in a green, full-skirted strapless dress to sing Ombra mai fu from Xerxes and Ah mio cor from Alcina. The former was funereal, though she sounded gorgeous. The second was much better, faster, and there was something she did at the segue into the middle section unaccompanied when her voice soared and fell and changed key and all sorts, and we all held our breath.
And then we had Handel's Water Music, which is too familiar and I fell asleep.
And that was followed by our Joyce back for Haydn's Scena di Berenice which is a splendidly dramatic concert aria. She was great: lyrical, highly dramatic, thrillingly low at times.
The Mendelssohn contrasts light and dark in the first movement (the Scots weather?), first brassy, then flute and clarinet. There are lovely melodies in the third movement. And a bouncy finish.
G didn't like Norrington: he thinks he's a show-off, turning to the audience at the end and bouncing like a schoolboy.
1/9/09
Royal Concertgebouw with Mariss Janson doing Haydn's Symphony No 100, the Military, and Shostakovich's Symphony No 10.
I failed to make a note at the time and remember nothing of it.
The reviews below help bring some of it back, notably the four percussionists marching on at the end of the Haydn.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/6126100/BBC-Proms-Mariss-Jansons-and-the-Royal-Concertgebouw-Orchestra.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/06/bbc-proms-classical-music-review-maddocks
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b2f6ada-98aa-11de-aa1b-00144feabdc0.html
1/9/09
Late-night Prom with the Michael Nyman Band.
Initially riveting: loud, repetitive, rhythmic with a spectacular sense of impetus and drive. Think Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds, the theme tune from The Draughtsman's Contract.
The trouble is, they all sound like that: same minimalist techniques, same (amplified) instrumentation.
Alas it became boring in the end
Sunday, 16 August 2009
PROM: HANDEL
12/8/09, Royal Albert Hall
2 hrs 15 mins. Harry Christophers and The Sixteen (who on this occasion numbered 32 plus band and soprano Carolyn Sampson for the solos) in an all-Handel programme.
All four 1727 Coronation Odes (George II), interspersed with a rousing overture (Arrival of the Queen of Sheba: she got there first, I arrived too late), plus extracts from Semele, a lush 1707 Italian setting of Salve Regina and a 1735 Organ Concerto. A clever blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar and pretty much unalloyed joy.
Salve Regina (with Carolyn Sampson as soprano soloist in a demure black dress) was delightful and sensuous, with a brief, quiet coda.
The organ concerto (Alastair Ross) was apparently written to be played at performances of the oratorio Athalia, drawing on Handel's reputation as one of the finest organists of the age (according to the programme). There really wasn't much for the band to do, though it did end with a rousing Alleluia chorus to trumpet and drums accompaniment. A fizzy, showy work.
Carolyn Sampson was one wonderful form as Semele, playing the coquette in a startling backless dress. I thought she was a bit underpowered at the start, her voice getting lost in the Albert Hall's vast spaces, but she turned out to be perfect. They did three numbers: Endless Pleasure; My Racking Thoughts (a slow, reflective number sung to an unusual continuo accompaniment by cello, harp and theorbo playing a repeated, syncopated figure); and Myself I Shall Adore. For the last one Christophers handed her a mirror (the concert was televised) and she had enormous fun pouting and preening, especially in the da capo repeat with spectacular ornamentation and a positive unaccompanied cadenza at the conclusion.
The anthems build steadily to the triumphant Zadok, which made the hair stand on end just as it's supposed to. A musically-sophisticated composer who nonetheless knew how to engage an audience with directness and simplicity. Handel's choral writing at its finest.
2 hrs 15 mins. Harry Christophers and The Sixteen (who on this occasion numbered 32 plus band and soprano Carolyn Sampson for the solos) in an all-Handel programme.
All four 1727 Coronation Odes (George II), interspersed with a rousing overture (Arrival of the Queen of Sheba: she got there first, I arrived too late), plus extracts from Semele, a lush 1707 Italian setting of Salve Regina and a 1735 Organ Concerto. A clever blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar and pretty much unalloyed joy.
Salve Regina (with Carolyn Sampson as soprano soloist in a demure black dress) was delightful and sensuous, with a brief, quiet coda.
The organ concerto (Alastair Ross) was apparently written to be played at performances of the oratorio Athalia, drawing on Handel's reputation as one of the finest organists of the age (according to the programme). There really wasn't much for the band to do, though it did end with a rousing Alleluia chorus to trumpet and drums accompaniment. A fizzy, showy work.
Carolyn Sampson was one wonderful form as Semele, playing the coquette in a startling backless dress. I thought she was a bit underpowered at the start, her voice getting lost in the Albert Hall's vast spaces, but she turned out to be perfect. They did three numbers: Endless Pleasure; My Racking Thoughts (a slow, reflective number sung to an unusual continuo accompaniment by cello, harp and theorbo playing a repeated, syncopated figure); and Myself I Shall Adore. For the last one Christophers handed her a mirror (the concert was televised) and she had enormous fun pouting and preening, especially in the da capo repeat with spectacular ornamentation and a positive unaccompanied cadenza at the conclusion.
The anthems build steadily to the triumphant Zadok, which made the hair stand on end just as it's supposed to. A musically-sophisticated composer who nonetheless knew how to engage an audience with directness and simplicity. Handel's choral writing at its finest.
Saturday, 1 August 2009
BACH MOTETS
28/7/09, Royal Albert Hall (Prom)
1 hr 20 mins. Late-night Prom with John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir plus soloists (chamber organ, double bass, two cellos, bassoon). Too late for me: this kind of music needs concentration which is hard to summon at ten pm; I kept falling asleep, left with a general impression of tuneful noise.
Thirty-eight singers, four motets, three of them with split choirs placed either side of the organ; the third a single choir (though six of the women dropped out for part of it, and there was a beautiful section for tenor, bass and soprano.
The motet was apparently a more old fashioned form than the cantata, for which Bach is best known. Cantatas include instrumental passages, solo singers and a lot more colour and variation. Some of his more puritan contemporaries deplored cantatas as excessively "operatic". But they were more involving, more emotionally rewarding apparently than motets.
I'm not qualified to judge. All of these seemed to me pretty sophisticated works. When Petroc Trelawny came on stage for the Radio 3 intro he interviewed Gardiner and asked if it was "too simple to say Bach's motets were unsophisticated" Gardiner replied flatly "It's wrong": that got a laugh.
I remain impressed by Bach rather than moved or seduced. There's something a little too perfect about the surface textures of all that choral singing. And you can't understand the words, unlike much of Handel, which makes a big difference.
But these pieces displayed great variety of tempo and texture and some pretty tunes.
Some reviews:
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/concerts/prom09-17-0709.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/29/cbso-nelsons-monteverdi-choir-gardiner
1 hr 20 mins. Late-night Prom with John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir plus soloists (chamber organ, double bass, two cellos, bassoon). Too late for me: this kind of music needs concentration which is hard to summon at ten pm; I kept falling asleep, left with a general impression of tuneful noise.
Thirty-eight singers, four motets, three of them with split choirs placed either side of the organ; the third a single choir (though six of the women dropped out for part of it, and there was a beautiful section for tenor, bass and soprano.
The motet was apparently a more old fashioned form than the cantata, for which Bach is best known. Cantatas include instrumental passages, solo singers and a lot more colour and variation. Some of his more puritan contemporaries deplored cantatas as excessively "operatic". But they were more involving, more emotionally rewarding apparently than motets.
I'm not qualified to judge. All of these seemed to me pretty sophisticated works. When Petroc Trelawny came on stage for the Radio 3 intro he interviewed Gardiner and asked if it was "too simple to say Bach's motets were unsophisticated" Gardiner replied flatly "It's wrong": that got a laugh.
I remain impressed by Bach rather than moved or seduced. There's something a little too perfect about the surface textures of all that choral singing. And you can't understand the words, unlike much of Handel, which makes a big difference.
But these pieces displayed great variety of tempo and texture and some pretty tunes.
Some reviews:
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/concerts/prom09-17-0709.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/29/cbso-nelsons-monteverdi-choir-gardiner
BBC SO/ANDREW DAVIES
22/7/09, Royal Albert Hall (Prom)
Mixed programme to mark the 800th anniversary of Cambridge University (apparently). Vaughan Williams' The Wasps Overture and Five Mystical Songs; a new piece by Ryan Wigglesworth; choral pieces by Stanford, Jonathan Harvey and Judith Weir; Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony. The BBC Symphony joined by assorted Cambridge choirs, including (of course) King's and St John's.
I was late, thanks to work. Missed all the security brouhaha because the Prince of Wales was in the audience and walked in with no inspections. Missed the handing out of little flags with the Cambridge Uni crest on. Missed the National Anthem, arranged by Sir David Willcocks. Missed The Wasps. Went up the grand staircase and along the Circle corridor, and was accosted (as he came out of the gents) by Jo's boyfriend S, who said he was up in the Gallery. So I joined him up there.
Got a bird's eye view of the Wigglesworth, including umpteen types of percussion: classical music as theatre.
I thought it was a bit odd that S was in the gents during the performance... and that when I asked, him he didn't know what we were listening to. Not much of a musician, I thought; doesn't seem to take his concert-going very seriously. And was positively alarmed when the Wigglesworth finished, I slipped away to join D and as I did so a young woman, not Jo, marched smiling up to S.
Our seats were right on the very end of the Circle balcony, somewhere above the cellos. Not bad for £7. Listened to Five Mystical Soings: plangent, haunting, with the baritone Simon Keenlyside and a huge choir of surprisingly young people (I still hadn't clocked the Cambridge connection).
Then as the applause faded a brief trumpet fanfare rang out from above and behind us and we turned to see some young women unveiling a "Climate Rush" banner over the side of the Gallery. A very genteel protest. Rushed upstairs to confirm that it was indeed S's trumpet.
Second half might have been an anti-climax but wasn't. The Stanford, sung by a reduced choir, is a great late Victorian warhorse. For the other two choral pieces (sung unaccompanied) first John's director of music (Andrew Nethsingha) and then King's director (Stephen Cleobury) took over from Davies, with just the King's and John's combined choirs (complete with choirboys). The Harvey was a beautiful piece derived from plainsong. The Weir was grittier and less involving (I was uninvolved enough indeed to look over at the Royal Box, where HRH didn't seem to think much of it either since he was thumbing through his programme).
Davies returned for the Saint-Saens, which is a very silly but crazily uplifting piece of music, a glorious romp. Though why the BBC Symphony bothered to stay for much of the last movement beats me, since the Albert Hall organ is so powerful it drowned the orchestra entirely for much of the time.
Mixed programme to mark the 800th anniversary of Cambridge University (apparently). Vaughan Williams' The Wasps Overture and Five Mystical Songs; a new piece by Ryan Wigglesworth; choral pieces by Stanford, Jonathan Harvey and Judith Weir; Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony. The BBC Symphony joined by assorted Cambridge choirs, including (of course) King's and St John's.
I was late, thanks to work. Missed all the security brouhaha because the Prince of Wales was in the audience and walked in with no inspections. Missed the handing out of little flags with the Cambridge Uni crest on. Missed the National Anthem, arranged by Sir David Willcocks. Missed The Wasps. Went up the grand staircase and along the Circle corridor, and was accosted (as he came out of the gents) by Jo's boyfriend S, who said he was up in the Gallery. So I joined him up there.
Got a bird's eye view of the Wigglesworth, including umpteen types of percussion: classical music as theatre.
I thought it was a bit odd that S was in the gents during the performance... and that when I asked, him he didn't know what we were listening to. Not much of a musician, I thought; doesn't seem to take his concert-going very seriously. And was positively alarmed when the Wigglesworth finished, I slipped away to join D and as I did so a young woman, not Jo, marched smiling up to S.
Our seats were right on the very end of the Circle balcony, somewhere above the cellos. Not bad for £7. Listened to Five Mystical Soings: plangent, haunting, with the baritone Simon Keenlyside and a huge choir of surprisingly young people (I still hadn't clocked the Cambridge connection).
Then as the applause faded a brief trumpet fanfare rang out from above and behind us and we turned to see some young women unveiling a "Climate Rush" banner over the side of the Gallery. A very genteel protest. Rushed upstairs to confirm that it was indeed S's trumpet.
Second half might have been an anti-climax but wasn't. The Stanford, sung by a reduced choir, is a great late Victorian warhorse. For the other two choral pieces (sung unaccompanied) first John's director of music (Andrew Nethsingha) and then King's director (Stephen Cleobury) took over from Davies, with just the King's and John's combined choirs (complete with choirboys). The Harvey was a beautiful piece derived from plainsong. The Weir was grittier and less involving (I was uninvolved enough indeed to look over at the Royal Box, where HRH didn't seem to think much of it either since he was thumbing through his programme).
Davies returned for the Saint-Saens, which is a very silly but crazily uplifting piece of music, a glorious romp. Though why the BBC Symphony bothered to stay for much of the last movement beats me, since the Albert Hall organ is so powerful it drowned the orchestra entirely for much of the time.
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