Music
Right and wrong noises
Peter Phillips
The aura of the Proms seems to be working its magic on the concert-going public as reliably as ever. Night after night I have attended 'sold out' concerts, in sti- fling heat, no matter whether the music or the performers have been especially well known. And now we know that the Albert Hall can take it: there for all to see are its foundations, exposed on the southern side by developers building an underground car park (and renewing the facilities for the artists, which means we won't have to change in the loos any more), encouraging- ly massive. The electricity supply may be uncertain, the ceiling shabby, the tiles prone to peeling off the walls in the loud bits, but the framework is rock solid.
It must be encouraging for Nicholas Kenyon to know that the public is still fol- lowing him, now after several years of experiment and innovation, from Irish folk groups to film music to a concert which consisted of three symphonies. This last, on 3 September, seemed to me to typify the current mood of the Proms, not dissimilar in some respects from that of the Globe Theatre, both presenting a successful for- mula which brings its own drawbacks. They can give the impression of being theme parks for foreigners, a must-do for visitors who have achieved all they had set their sights on just by getting into the building, regardless of what is being presented. All the predictable distractions follow coughing in silences, whispering, mobile phones and so on — every infringement rewarded with righteous glares from the stalwarts in the pit, the atmosphere too often distractingly tense. It is true that all this is worse at the Globe; but I think it is worse at the Proms than it was. I also wonder what has happened to those acceptable noises people used to make from amongst the audience. Perhaps I have been to the wrong shows, but I've heard none of the badinage from pit to upper gallery, the yelled witticisms in uni- son, the applauding of the oboe A, the heave-ho of the piano lid being raised, which were invariable delights of past sea- sons. Is it that the audience is getting older? Have the Proms finally fallen foul of a generatiQn gap (as the Utrecht Early Music Festival seems to have done) after all this time? It is no longer so clear as it was that the Proms is helping to solve the problem of making classical music more appealing to young people, outside special events like the Blue Peter Family Prom. Thirty years ago, with much smaller audi- ences overall, they were.
The high point for me so far has been Glyndebourne's PeIleas et Milisande, con- ducted by Andrew Davis. Apparently the singers were coming to it after a month off, their batteries newly charged. It was pas- sionately interpreted by all the principals, who sang in a style which would have been harder to find across an entire operatic cast not long ago. In the past the incidence of overly large, badly focused voices was greater, in keeping with public taste. This kind of singing is clearly going out of fash- ion. Yes, that peculiar intensity of expres- sion which comes with perfect tuning has spread outwards from the early music busi- ness and now established itself in every- body's consciousness. If what I heard from the Glyndebourne stars Richard Croft, Christiane Oelze and John Tomlinson is typical of the operatic scene more general- ly, a glorious revolution has indeed taken place. The semi-staging of this perfor- mance had the unlooked-for effect of putting me in mind of the paintings of Rene Magritte, rather than those of any of the Impressionists: the stares across the stage had just his quality of static silence.
The night of the three symphonies pre- sented as daring a line-up of pieces as any in this year's Proms. To start a concert with Sibelius's Seventh is to set oneself the rebarbative task of not making one of the greatest works of its kind sound like any old overture. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Mark Wigglesworth failed in this quest quite spectacularly, missing every nuance, hardly breaking sweat (unlike the rest of us in the packed hall), great music reduced to a pretty sound. Lutoslawski's Fourth seemed to bring a whole new range of gestures out of Wig- glesworth, which was welcome, but a com- plex score was still made to sound as easy and as uninvolving as pie. After all this I awaited Tchaikovsky's Sixth with some trepidation. It is well-known music, of course, difficult to make something original from these days. Ironically, it might have made more impact if it had been preceded by an overture and a concerto.
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