Music
The Cruise of the Prom
By DAVID CAIRNS 'THE balance customary between tradition and adventure is undis- turbed.' These sober words come A., from the BBC's prospectus for the 64th season of the Proms. And I do not think any reasonably impartial man, after a glance at the eight-week programme, can deny that the BBC have a point there. Another victory for the ancient British principle of compromise.
Now, any culture snob can knock the Proms. But however often it has been made before, there is something sublime about that great annual cruise through the high seas of symphonic music. Few rare ports or remote and doubtful islands may ever be touched at; yet the scale and sweep of the journey is fabulous. And if many of the travellers make it in steerage conditions calculated to turn the stomachs of the fastidious, so much the worse for the fastidious. Personally, I am willingly sucked into the hot, crimson heart of the huge audience, and though Sir Malcolm's Beaumont Street bedside manner may cover the rhythmic sensitivity of a metronome, or Mr. Basil Cameron spend half a symphony groping for its pulse, I cannot help enjoying myself.
From the seat allotted me, low down and round to the side, I have a ringside view of the fun. Sargent, shiny as a well-dressed lizard, conducts from the shoulders, or rather from the lapel (what happens to all those white carnations afterwards?), with an incredible number of beats in the bar, while Cameron, sketching indetermin- ate gestures on the smoky air, can yet conjure up a musical performance. After scrutiny of the rostrum, I turn in my swivelling' bucket-seat and watch the shirt-sleeved, sweating multitude at its priest-like task. It is, unless one has a heart of stone, a stirring sight. To see music in this nook- shotten isle of Albion publicly honoured without a blush puts new life into one after, say, the empty elegances of the Glyndebourne audience.
To all appearances this is a bumper year at the Proms. The BBC hold in their grasp what no ordinary concert promoter would allow himself to dream of, a huge, regular, devoted and above all humble audience, ready to be led by the hand and told where to go—a real fund of that rare commodity invoked by politicians and top people, good will. What do the BBC do with it?
Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and the rest are the obvious and inevitable staple fare, to which it is customary to add a seasoning of novelties. It is just here, in the one department of Prom planning which calls for judgment and imagination, that the BBC fail so badly. 'Two Living British Composers,' announced a recent notice of a Prom in our greatest national daily— as if to correct any impression we might have formed that they had been dead a good twenty years—adding that this was not, praise be, music 'that is "ever so contemporary." ' That is to be expected, but it is distressing to find the BBC falling back into the same seedy provincialism. Too many of these 'novelties' are in not because they are good (let alone novel) but because they are British. The Proms are treated as a lovely, cosy family reunion, an occasion for good old Uncle X to do a new card trick, or dear Auntie Y to declaim her latest poem. In other words, the docile public are exploited so that composers whose very names spell toiling medi- ocrity, and whose works should only be allowed out of doors for a week's outing in a bathchair at Cheltenham, can bask in the wholly undeserved applause of five thousand innocent pairs of hands.
Take Dover Beach, a bit of academic day- dreaming in 3/4 time for baritone and orchestra by Mr. Maurice Johnstone. 'Composition is for him inevitably a spare-time occupation,' con- fessed an unusually candid programme note (Mr. Johnstone is head of Sound Music Programmes on the BBC). It is said that when Arnold's poem was broadcast, during the war the final line, 'Where ignorant armies clash by night,' was emended lest it be thought to reflect unfavour- ably on our men in the armed forces. Mr. Johnstone's composition has caught the spirit of the emendation exactly. The composer con- ducted with his left hand; that, I suppose, was the novelty. In other respects his orthodoxy is impeccable.
To be fair, the second half of the Proms rarely sinks so low. To invite Aaron Copland to con- duct his new orchestral version of the 1930 Piano Variations and three movements from the ballet suite Rodeo was a master stroke, for the variations are tough but impressive. Rodeo is a brilliantly entertaining work whose pithy and inventive use of American folksong shows up some of our native purveyors of homespun, while Copland's dynamism on the rostrum, combining the gleaming intelligence of a super-egghead and the rah-rahing exuberance of a cheerleader with an incisive mastery of his craft, had the audience stamping on the floor in a way that threatened to turn a family devotion into a tribal explosion. There is also, perhaps, something to be said for the policy of repeating important works which have lately had their first perform- ance—Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony (an unconvincing piece, however) or Malcolm Arnold's Third. Tippett's No. 2, on the other hand, was a bad choice. I am almost convinced that this is not the work's fault. The BBC is not as good an orchestra as the LSO, which played the Copland pieces so well; it gave no more than a reading of the score, and in particular deprived the first movement of the Stravinskian rhythmic drive which is its main raison d'être. But, above all, Tippett's Symphony is an intensely difficult and intricate work whose beauties will only be revealed by many more hours of rehearsal than the Promenade dispensation allows for.
This touches indirectly the-nub of the question. Is a Prom the place for novelties, genuine or otherwise? Would it not be far better if the BBC frankly abandoned this snivelling lip-service to 'contemporary music' and used their unique power intelligently and constructively—by doing for the twentieth-century repertoire something of what they have already done so splendidly for the nineteenth? Take this year's programmes—one work by Bartok, none by Hindemith, only three by Stravinsky (and none later that 1920), only one full-length work by Britten (no need to say what that is). It is a sorry catalogue of squandered opportunities. Yet the BBC, unlike other im- presarios, do not have to plead public con- servatism as their excuse. Their audience is conservative, but it is there. It has come to hear Beethoven; it will stay to hear anything that is going. Here is a golden chance to correct the lop- sided balance of our musical life, to fix com- posers, who abroad are established classics of the age, belatedly in the familiar affections of the mass of the British musical public. If only the BBC would drop their feeble pretence of'keeping abreast of the times, recognise this opportunity for what it is, and seize it.
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