The summer has finally arrived – and right on cue, the Proms. It was pleasing to see a packed house for the First Night, with 6,000 people fanning themselves in the heat, and pleasing, too, to see down in the packed arena one person wearing a silly hat bearing a Union Jack. The Royal Albert Hall feels like the last place left in Britain where you can show the flag without fear of arrest.
As for the music, the outgoing director David Pickard wisely decided that that jubilation should be the keynote. Ranged around the organ were the massed singers of the BBC Chorus and below them the BBC Singers, and on the platform below them the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which launched the evening with the Ouverture from Handel’s Water Music.
The arrangement of Handel by Sir Charles Mackerras was splendidly multi-coloured without being overblown, and Hong Kong-born composer Elim Chan directed with firecracker energy—as she did with the following piece, Bruckner’s gloriously aspiring setting of the 150th Psalm. Sophie Bevan was the tender-voiced soloist, her notes entwined with the equally tender playing of the orchestra’s leader Igor Yuzefovich, but it was those ringing top Cs from the choirs that really told.
There was more jubilation to come, with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, but before that came some romantic pianistic fireworks, interspersed with dreamy reflectiveness, in the shape of the Piano Concerto by Clara Schumann.
The soloist, Isata Kanneh-Mason caught the dreamy reflectiveness beautifully, and gave a ball-room elegance to the finger-twisting virtuosity of the final movement.
But as I’ve felt before with this pianist, the lyrical expressivity of the music seemed muted. The whole thing had a porcelain delicacy, attractive in itself but missing some vital dimension.
The evening’s premiere from young Japanese-British composer Ben Nobuto brought us down with a bump. The programme note described Nobuto as post-modern, which was dispiriting in itself. Didn’t the world grow out of “witty” collages of high and pop culture in about 1995? Alas it seems not.
The idea clearly grips Nobuko, who in his Hallelujah Sim (short for Hallelujah Simulation) took bits of the joyous Bruckner we’d just heard and subjected to them to a sort of parlour game. An unseen narrator, speaking in one of those annoying American robot voices which assures you that “your call is important to us”, gave blankly automated instructions – sing this chord, add that – which the chorus followed, with properly robotic promptness.
It was all done with great style and wit, but I hated it nonetheless. Cynicism does not become less cynical, just because it comes gift-wrapped in shiny paper and a nice ribbon.
It seemed cruel of the Proms organisers to follow this with the best-known symphony by classical music’s greatest idealist. It was almost as if they wanted to show up the hollowness of the new piece we’d just heard. Granted, the performance itself wasn’t the greatest. It felt hard-driven, and not always perfectly focussed. But it certainly raised the spirits.
Hear this concert on BBC Sounds and watch it on BBC iPlayer for 12 months. The Proms continue daily until 14 September bbc.co.uk/proms
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