The Proms must go on
Nicholas Kenyon on how he coped with a series of last-minute cancellations T. lose one conductor may be regarded as a misfortune: to lose two looks like carelessness; to lose three in a row plus a soprano soloist, a bedridden narrator and a mysteriously disappearing percussion duo may seem like plain bad management.
Cancellations are part of any artistic manager's life, but the BBC Proms have an enviably good record of artists turning up: no more than a handful cancel, and one of the season's great attractions is that artists from all over the world actually want to perform there. Compared with some continental opera houses, where rarely a night may go by without a singer losing their voice or getting a better offer, we do well at offering the public what they have paid for. But if artists fall ill, nothing can stop them.
Conductors are usually the last to go: they are legendarily tough and tend to live as long as Titian, though there have been some tragic exceptions to that rule recently. Claudio Abbado nearly died last year from stomach cancer, yet he recovered seemingly by sheer willpower to conduct Wagner's Tristan, the Verdi Requiem and a Beethoven symphony cycle in Rome and Vienna. As Abbado was recovering, Giuseppe Sinopoli, who had not been at all ill, collapsed and died during a performance of Aida in Berlin.
It was Sinopoli's sudden death that led to the departure of one of last week's Proms conductors, Adam Fischer. He was offered the chance to replace Sinopoli in three years of Ring cycles in Bayreuth. It would have been churlish to refuse him that extensive opportunity for the sake of one Prom. Happily, in his place the orchestra proposed Helmut Rilling, a conductor I had not seen in this country since the pioneering days of my first employer Lina Lalandi's English Bach Festival. I was able to remind Rilling of — and found he remembered all too well — the immortal incident when, conducting the Bach St Matthew Passion in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, there came the unmistakable sound of a brass band processing down Broad Street outside: the performers, bewildered, ground to a halt. Rilling came back to London, learnt the whole of Haydn's Seasons from memory, and delighted both performers and audience.
That replacement could be planned reasonably well in advance, consulting everyone necessary. When illness strikes, it rarely gives more than 48 hours' notice and can be solved only by my tireless artistic administrator hitting the phones to see who is not rehearsing an opera, making a CD (somewhat rarer these days than it used to be) or on the one precious holiday of their year. When our soprano for that Haydn Seasons fell ill, we took the risk on Simone Nold, an artist strongly recommended but quite unknown in this country (I had seen her in a dense Elliott Carter opera in Berlin but had never heard her in anything resembling Haydn). We were handsomely rewarded with a triumphant debut which gained her outstanding reviews, and she will surely be back here soon.
In these cases the Proms are completely reliant on the labours of resilient agents and managers who track down their artists at totally unsociable hours and establish their availability. My predecessor, John Drummond, once summoned Kurt Masur by telephone from a beach to conduct Beethoven's Ninth at the Proms in place of an ailing Klaus Tennstedt. When the great Russian conductor Evgeny Svetlanov had to cancel his BBC Symphony Orchestra concert last week through illness, a top-quality replacement was essential and a major trawl was instigated. In these cases you have to be sure that the soloist you have already booked is a good match for the conductor (and indeed vice-versa), and that the programme can be kept as intact as possible.
The choice happiest for all was Lawrence Foster, who conducted with panache, changed only one piece, and rose to the occasion in every way — when the violinist's string snapped half way through the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Concerto he was able to regale the ence with a story about another broken string (this was during the Penderecki concerto, and the soloist insisted on starting again from the beginning, which was not a very popular decision).
The most serious illness of the week was that of conductor Neeme Ja'rvi, still recovering from an aneurysm from which he could quite possibly have died. He's an enormously popular figure with the Proms audience, and the project he was leading — the complete music for Grieg's Peer Gynt, also destined for the Salzburg Festival — was of great complexity. The choice to replace him fell on the brilliant Manfred Honeck. He had come to our rescue twice previously. When Mariss Jansons keeled over in the final bars of Puccini's La Boheme with a heart attack that put him temporarily out of action, Honeck stood in with the Oslo Philharmonic, and then did the same again last year — indeed, he said to me, when I got the call from the orchestra, I saw your face and couldn't say nor Then we lost our narrator, Paul Scofield, for that Peer Gynt — for me a particularly sad cancellation because I had venerated him since I was a teenager and he had been learning his part intensively because, as he put it on the telephone, 'I need to know my words as well as the musicians know their music'. Fortunately on hand was a great friend of the Proms, the flamboyant Simon Callow, veteran of previous Peer Gynts, to whom a desperate early-morning fax elicited a response within minutes; he made the script his own in a matter of hours and wowed the packed hall.
Which leaves us to account for the puzzling disappearance of our pair of percussionists, the Safri Duo. Where are they now? Without any apology to us, they pulled out of Friday's British premiere of a new work by Pout Ruders written specially for them and already premiered by them in Denmark. Apparently, we learned, the lure of the pop scene has proved too great for them, and they had suddenly decided to give up classical music. I do hope they have a longer career in pop. Thank heavens for Evelyn Glennie, who stepped into the breach, and with her colleague Gert Mortensen learned the piece from scratch and bash and cymbal clash; every day she crosses the boundaries between pop and classical music with ease and reaches a vast audience as a result. She's the sort of artist who makes running the Proms worthwhile.
Back to normal this week? It will be tempting providence to hope so. Back at the office, we need to plan next year's Proms, not this year's again.
Nicholas Kenyon is director of BBC Proms.
Previous page
