Prom 38: 'Audience Choice', Budapest Festival Orchestra, I. Fischer, Sun. 13 Aug 2023

[bluestateprommer]

Sunday 13 August 2023
14:00
Royal Albert Hall

Programme partly determined in real time at the Royal Albert Hall from audience selections. Full programme, including advance audience selections and works intervening works selected by the orchestra and conductor:

Glinka: Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture (audience choice by internet voting)

Shostakovich: Five Pieces - No. 1 (orchestra advance choice)

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4, op. 36 - 1st movement (audience choice)

Klemzer selection (orchestra advance choice)

Beethoven: Symphony No. 6, op. 68 - 2nd movement (audience choice)

Hungarian folk selections, choral (orchestra advance choice)

Dvořák: Symphony No. 7, op. 70 - 3rd movement, excerpt (audience choice)

Monteverdi: Scherzi (orchestra advance choice)

Felix Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3, op. 56 ("Scottish") - 4th movement, excerpt (audience choice)

Encores:
Vincent Youmans; "Tea for Two"
Brahms: Hungarian Dance No. 5


Budapest Festival Orchestra
Iván Fischer, conductor

https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e9x6gw

https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/proms/bbc-proms-2023/prom-38-audience-choice/

[smittims]

I've known this done at organ recirals, where the organist improvises on a theme supplied by a member of the audience. I wonder how it will work, and how well-rehearsed the interpretations will (or can) be. We're told they have a choice from 200 pieces, which is rather a lot .

[french frank]

Next Sunday (Aug 13), Prom 38 at 14:00

I wonder which 'more than 200 classical pieces' were on the list to be chosen. Not Mahler 3, presumably, which will be performed on Aug 19th (Prom 45). Mozart's Das Donnerwetter, perhaps?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I do wish Radio 3 would stop plugging this gimmick. It’s been repeated endlessly - every time I switch on.

[alywin]

Quite. And you'd think from what they were saying that it was only the "overture" which was the audience choice. But nobody has said anything about the other pieces.

[oddoneout]

Quite. And you'd think from what they were saying that it was only the "overture" which was the audience choice. But nobody has said anything about the other pieces.

Might that be deliberate - to limit the number of responses R3 has to deal with? After all we know that staff to deal with listeners are limited...

[bluestateprommer]

There were some stray comments about the BFO's "Audience Choice" Prom in the thread for Prom 39, but otherwise not a lot of discussion that at least I saw. The verbal proceedings were more than a bit flustered at times, with Ivan Fischer apparently unable to hear fully clearly the information from some of the audience members with their requests. Even Petroc broke his generally-observed rule of avoiding editorializing, to note the occasional borderline chaos of events, but with justification, since that's how things got at times. He didn't dwell on that, though, or over-talk about it, not by any means.

All that aside, just to summarize in e-print, the real-time audience nominations were:

1st movement:
Mahler 1
Dvorak 9
Tchaikovsky 4 (winner)

2nd movement:
Haydn 92
Haydn 83
Beethoven 6 (winner)

3rd movement:
Schubert 3
Dvorak 7 (winner; performed abridged)
Mozart 25

4th movement:
Dvorak 9
Mendelssohn 3 (winner; performed abridged)
Mahler 5 (4th movement Adagietto)

IMVHO, the most offbeat choices were in the middle two movements, needless to say, the ones that didn't get chosen (two Haydn choices for the 2nd movement, the Schubert and Mozart for the 3rd movement). The winning choices in the first two movements clearly had unintended consequences for the 3rd and 4th movements, because of the sheer lengths of the Tchaikovsky and the Beethoven. Fischer very dryly mentioned that several movement nominations were "quite long" more than once, to audience laughter, but not enough of them took the hints to pick short enough movements, so that each of the 4 individual movements could be performed complete. Instead, for the 3rd movement, there was just the introduction with the main theme to the first diminuendo, about 2.5 minutes later, and for the 4th movement, there was only the final coda of Mendelssohn's "Scottish". I wonder if the orchestra stood in sections as reportedly happened at the full performance of Mendelssohn 3 the evening before (Forumites who were there can obviously confirm or deny).

One charmingly awkward moment of odd communication was with the Mozart, where the child who said "Mozart" wasn't able to provide the full details on Mozart 25, and his mom (presumably) had to step in. The Prommers sort of got gypped out of their encore, as these were their nominations from the Arena (evidently not logistically possible to get the Gallery Prommers involved):

Ravel: Daphnis and Chloe, Suite No. 2
Prokofiev: The Love for Three Oranges - March
Milhaud: Le boeuf sur le toit

The Prokofiev might have worked out, but it seemed that Ivan Fischer had to put his foot down, so to speak, because of time constraints.

All things considered, this was an entertaining listen, and the orchestra did very well with sight-reading the movements. If nothing else, this is another example of how messy democracy can sometimes be ; .