Glockenfest ARTS
CHARLES REID
The Proms got off to a luckless and rather fumbled start. It wasn't merely that illness kept Sir Malcolm Sargent from the opening Saturday night, an occasion which cries out for his practised and stabilising touch if the ritualistic high jinks of the young crowd along the orchestral rail are to be kept not in hand, exactly, but, let us say, in perspective. A more serious consideration was a conventional streak in the first two programmes.
On Saturday we had the Grieg piano con- certo. Next night (for the Proms nowadays occasionally spill over on to Sundays) came the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Neither had a distinguished performance. In the case of the Grieg, which never got off the ground (the adagio managed to sound lethargic without be- ing overslow), I do not blame the substitute conductor, Colin Davis, who had been button- holed at very short notice. The soloist, Fou Ts'ong, made two excruciating mis-hits, one of them on the opening page, which wouldn't have excruciated anything like as much if the per- formance as a whole had been more spirited. In the Mendelssohn the Polish violinist Wanda Wilkomirska, backed by the Polish Radio Or- chestra under Jan Krenz, sounded natty and sweet most of the time but, in the cadenza, pro- duced two sharp trills, presumably to counter- balance a woefully flat opening phrase in the preceding piece, Berlioz 's Benvenuto Cellini overture, by the Poles' otherwise impeccable and stylish first flute.
The fact that two chestnuts had flawed or lame performances is not the essential point, however. The question is why chestnuts should have had any place at all in these programmes. In the last seven years, that is to say since Wil- liam Glock took over as BBC music controller, the Proms have so expanded in repertory and in range of performing talent (this time there are fifteen orchestras, two of them from abroad, and thirty conductors, including a dozen foreigners) that for once in a way we may in- dulge in chauvinistic swank and declare there's no other concert series in the world to touch them. When Mr Glock claims (he does so in the current Proms brochure) that the Proms 'have gradually become like an international festival,' he is guilty, through sheer modesty, of under- statement and inaccuracy. What other interna- tional festival has a top ticket price of fifteen shillings and, in eight weeks, trawls from Pales- Irina and Monteverdi through a mass of stan- dard classics to Stockhausen and Messiaen; from bits of Gondoliers. Sorcerer and (believe it or not) Messager's tz(ronirpre to Britten's Burning Fiery Furnace (costumed and enacted with overwhelming success on Monday night), I3erlioz's Trojans at Carthage. Fidelio (impor- ted from Covent Garden) and Don Giovanni (from Glyndebourne)?
But, reverting to my grumble, what other in- ternational festival would choose a pair of chestnut concertos to kick off with? And a pair of symphonies whose detail or, at any rate, idiom, we remember in our sleep? Haydn's No 88 in G major, which Mr Davis took over, is unfailing delight and has surprise turns of phrase and modulation which go on surprising however often we hear them. Tchaikovsky's No 4, which Mr Krenz and his fellow Poles performed with incidental tempi that challenged rather than converted me, remains one of the towers of symphonic music. Neither piece, how - ever, aroused the curiosity and excitement proper to so momentous an inaugural.
Admittedly, these two opening concerts had incidental breakaways and piquancy. The Poles played the first piece from Eastern Europe which reflects post-Webern or neo-Webern trends and those techniques of emancipation which are usually associated with Pierre Boulez. Witold Lutoslayski's Jeux venitiots, thus named because composed for the 1961 Venice Festival, is in three movements and runs for thirteen minutes. Some of the parts are in 'free' tempi, i.e., left to the players' discretion —which explains why, from time to time, Mr Krenz folded his arms and stood aloof, as if a solo cadenza was afoot.
As often happens in this type of music, a good third of the sound effects were as ravishing in their own right as banana split or sherry trifle. When the solo flute got to work in the third movement, sometimes frilly, sometimes palely floating, I actually sensed something as old- fashioned as it is undying: musical 'content' and 'purpose: Jena- got cheers from the younger end in the arena. On the previous night the Facade Suite had drawn connoisseur giggles from a similar though bigger crowd, partly be- cause of virtuoso work by the BBC Symphony Orchestra (woodwind and percussion soloists especially) and partly because Walton's parodies please the new generation as much as they did the 1920s. though perhaps in a different way.
The fact remains that Opening Night, in some of its aspects, has become a fixed convention. It is about the only feature of the Proms (apart from Closing Night, perhaps) to survive with such obstinacy to so little purpose. While wait- ing for the music to begin or resume, youngsters along the orchestra rail bark unintelligible slogans, sardonically cheer the gentleman in dinner jacket who opens the piano, aim streamers at front-row' fiddles and cellos. Why? Simply because this or something like it is what youngsters have been doing on Opening Night down the decades. These are the accepted, tra- ditional things to do. What could be hollower than rag become ritual? Most of the ritualists, however, seem knowledgeable and, when the music's on, behave like angels.
It follows that the music is what they really come for--- not for a hoary lark. That being the case I would have thought they could take and enjoy more adventurous inaugurals, with per- haps even a touch of majesty or stateliness. I dream (vainly. I'm sure) of an Opener with a great choral pile-up, supplementary brass in the galleries and something vast in the air, some- thing as grandly accessible as Handel though built to the scale of Mahler's Eighth or the Berlioz Regnion. What we need is a newsprung genius who shall see Heaven's gates open while composing something epic and consolin as introit to the most splendid music festival Europe or the New World knows. What could we have opened with this time? Britten's War
Requiem is the sort of thing—if caught young. Burrowing forward into the treasury that is now being Opened up I note Messiaen's Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum and the reverently canvassed St Luke's Passion of Pen- derecki. If Mr Glock had started on Saturday with these as a double bill what would have happened? Perhaps a thousand or so would have stayed away. (Not necessarily, however. The biggest audience a few seasons ago was drawn by a programme that included the Proms premiere of Schoenberg's 'forbidding' violin concerto.) Certainly there would have been a good and typical turn-up along the orchestral rail. First-night chestnuts are never hot.
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