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.

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.

VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY

30/11/08, RFH

2hrs approx (it was supposed to start at 19.30 but began late; we were out just before 21.50). Prokofiev, Autumnal; Rachmaninov Piano Concerto no 3 (soloist Simon Trpceski); Tchaikovsky Symphony no 4.

In the bar beforehand a woman came up with her husband and said she recognised me. Said she was only asking because she’d had the same surname before she was married, and the name was rare: she’d never met another she wasn’t related to. Her lot came from Worsley in Lancashire but we seemed to have no relatives in common. The husband I think was embarrassed that she’d introduced herself but she was very jolly. I was embarrassed because I haven’t shaved today.

The Prokofiev came and went. Inoffensive but unmemorable. Only about seven minutes. 40 strings, seven woodwind, a harp and a trumpet. The moustachioed harpist must be the only male harpist in London. Among the woodwind was an instrument that made an even lower note than a bassoon, apparently played by the oboeist but not listed separately. A lowboe? A basbois? The piece might have made more impression if I hadn’t been distracted by the man sitting immediately in front with his girlfriend, who began by filming the concert and then the pair of them with his digital camera. They canoodled distractingly throughout the concert. We oldies ticked mightily. I shut my eyes some of the time but that just meant I fell asleep.

A great deal of upheaval, half the players (and the harpist) leaving the stage so they can move the piano on. Scarcely seemed worth the trouble doing the Prokofiev at all.

The Rachmaninov played with enormous gusto, D thought very fast, certainly very loudly. If it has a structure I couldn’t discern it: it was just a succession of moments and effects, mostly very striking, but with only one memorable tune – a rather ominous drumbeat-like affair. (As I write this D remembers another tune, marginally more jolly.) Mr Trpceski (of whom we’d never heard) played with great passion, mopping his brow (and the keyboard) with a neatly folded white handkerchief more than once. His great moment the cadenza-like solo in the first movement, immensely long, splendidly bravura playing. When not playing he swayed to the music and swivelled round to look at the audience or the band. He looked less like a musician than an East European short order cook (expression copyright D).

I said confidently that I’d never heard the work in concert. When we got home D produced the programme from the Prom featuring the work that we went to in August.

The band augmented by full brass and timps plus three percussionists – who sat silent until almost the end when the older man addressed the bass drum, the woman deployed the cymbals and the other man… did three bars on the snare drum.

Trpceski played a beautiful encore none of us recognised. Very slow. Very quiet. Very intense. A mobile phone went off during the penultimate note.

Ashkenazy conducts like a marionette or a man learning semaphore. Great sweeping gestures. Then stock still, feet together, arms out, wrists jerkily moving. Then leaning right over. Then bouncing. He’s a smallish man, which may help explain it. A wider repertoire of gesture than almost any conductor I’ve seen.

The Tchaikovsky even noisier than the Rachmaninov, if possible. Band now augmented to 85 players. Great tunes, including the scherzo played pizzicato by the strings throughout (with a couple of interpolations by the woodwind), the fanfares thrown backwards and forwards between the brass and the horns in the first movement and the swaggering last movement, one of Tchaikovsky’s blow ‘em away marches – music to storm Moscow to. S said she thinks he used the same music again (before?) in Sleeping Beauty. D concurs, but thinks it was Romeo & Juliet.

They let the girl have a go on the big drum this time. She, cymbals and triangle all bang on time together on the off beat, so Ashkenazy definitely got that right.