The Proms
Unfamiliar pleasures
Peter Phillips
There's been some wonderful music played at the Proms recently. Whether it has been outstandingly well played hasn't mattered very much to me, who was hear- ing the pieces in question for the first time; they were, at least, competently played. The succession of BBC and youth orches- tras this year has been useful in showing up again the dividing line which seems to exist too much between orchestras which tour the world trying to give the best-ever per- formance of pieces we all know, and orchestras which by policy seek out new repertoire, by which I do not necessarily mean contemporary music.
These latter will almost certainly make less money by their approach since they will need more rehearsal time and probably draw smaller crowds; but the morale of their players will be higher over a span of years, and there are a number of conduc- tors, including I believe Simon Rattle, who are constantly struggling against commer- cial pressures to win the chance to work in the second category. In fact the BBC gives their orchestras just the kind of safety net many players long for: the fruits of their experiments have been very much on dis- play at the Albert Hall so far this season.
An example of this was the BBC Philhar- monic's performance on 12 August of Zemlinsky's Six Maeterlinck Songs with Jard van Nes, directed by Jiri Belohlavek. Alexander Zemlinslcy (1871-1942) was one of those highly influential figures who seemed to teach everybody more famous than himself, who consistently drew praise from the greatest composers of his day (always a slightly uncertain achievement, that) yet whose work, despite seeming superficially to be a middle-of-the-road amalgam of everything which surrounded him, really does have something entirely individual to convey. The problem is find- ing performances for such modest, if pow- erful voices: a predicament similar to that of a number of 20th-century English com- posers, like Lennox Berkeley. In these songs, beautifully sung by van Nes, it seemed almost beside the point to say that the sixth began like a long-lost movement from Mahler's Kindertotenlieder: in as much as it did it was lovely music and in as much as it didn't it was pure Zemlinsky, lovely music.
Szymanowski's Third Symphony, given by the Philharmonia under Claus Peter Flor on 19 August, sounds like no other music, unless it be Scriabin, having taken its point of departure from the composer's fascination with the Orient. By this route Szymanowski conceived a score which is lit- tle less than outrageously sensual, essen- tially closer to the contemporary cult of unbridled exoticism as preached by Wilde and Huysmans than to anything in Islamic thought, a kind of interpreted orientalism. This symphony may seem a little shapeless at first hearing since it depends on a suc- cession of brilliant orchestral effects, dur- ing which one would be forgiven for thinking that the orchestration had taken over the role of creating some sort of order out of its own enraptured chaos. Perhaps after all it will be found to have no struc- ture and after the 20th hearing I shall get impatient with it, but it was irresistible that night (and ideal for the Albert Hall). Try it at least once.
Maxwell Davies's Second Symphony (the BBC Philharmonic under Maxwell Davies on 13 August) is a difficult piece for every- one involved, so Max himself asseverated during the interval (I heard the broadcast at home), but essentially it was intended as a hymn to the sea. The listener would have been forgiven for being a little confused at the number of helpful hints the radio peo- ple thought to provide, the better to make the piece intelligible: Michael Hall suggest- ed Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata, mediaeval polyphony-cum-plain-chant and two different kinds of wave music; Max said that if the listener imagined himself in a boat at sea in a storm he would 'be fine'. I sat in my chair hoping not to be terrified out of my wits; and indeed the sheer abstract beauty of the orchestration (prominently featuring the marimba) car- ried me along, as it had done in the Szy- manowski. In such cases the programmes and explanations can come later. The BBC Philharmonic acquitted itself extremely well.
You may remember a year or two back that there was a scare about tiles falling off the Albert Hall. This year the problem appears to be a leak in the roof: Messiaen's Turangalila symphony was performed to the accompaniment of people sliding out of the way of falling water. I longed to see umbrellas going up: was I at Lord's? Apparently not. The place was full, and something essentially British seemed to be flourishing.
Previous page
