And we’re back. The “world’s greatest classical music festival” has flung wide the doors of the Royal Albert Hall for another eight-week season. Where the Last Night of the Proms is often strangely separate – a self-contained musical party for an entirely different audience – the First Night is the celebration for those here for the long haul, the scene-setter and season in microcosm. So what does this year’s have to say?
Whatever its current geopolitical strain, the “special relationship” is live and kicking in the concert hall. The 250th anniversary of American independence is front and centre this summer (because nationalism is always less embarrassing when it’s someone else’s), trumpeted from the off with – what else – Aaron Copland’s crowd-pleaser Fanfare for the Common Man.
Galvanising the BBC Symphony Orchestra with her trademark dynamism, the principal guest conductor, Dalia Stasevska, barely had our eyes raised to the broad vistas of hope and eternity Copland so artfully and non-specifically conjures before they were tugged down again to street level: to the teeming boulevards and traffic jams of Gershwin’s Paris.
Stasevska gave us not just An American in Paris but an American’s view of Paris. This was a broad, hearty account, the sights bigger and brighter, piling in hard one after the other in snapshots from wind and brass. No time for kerb-side pastis and people-watching here, but the BBCSO (including some very classy woodwind and brass soloists) was with her every breathless step of the way.
It may have been America 2 – France 0 but the two countries already had a rematch booked in the form of Ravel’s New York-accented Piano Concerto in G major – South Korean megastar Yunchan Lim the soloist. If this was French music it was the France of the Le Corbusier, Boulez and Brancusi: cool, clean and absolutely unsentimental. Not for Lim the jazz-bar seductions of the final Presto, nor the rhapsodic indulgence of the Allegramente’s climax. Instead we got étude-precision in gleaming passagework, and a slow movement of such introspective delicacy that it was barely audible in the hall. It was the performance of a pianist who, for all the circus that follows him, seems to shun display.
So far, so coherent. But the desire to be all things to all people got the better of programming after the interval. A new Emily Dickinson-based commission by Anglo-French composer Josephine Stephenson had little to say, but said it intermittently very loudly, while Finzi’s rarely heard For St Cecilia was stirring, but at its best when pretending to be Hubert Parry or Vaughan Williams. Soloist Thomas Atkins did beautiful things with Edmund Blunden’s cod-Horatian verse, and the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus gave it the full Jerusalem but the occasion only amplified the piece’s slight stature.
Luckily the BBC had a trick up their sleeve for extra time. An encore of Wonderwall for massed voices and orchestra was presumably intended as a World Cup homage but landed a little differently in light of this week’s events. A tribute from Manchester’s finest (and Andy Burnham’s favourite band) to a prime minister-in-waiting. Who says the Proms isn’t political?
