Prom 44 (14.8.12): London Sinfonietta

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Tuesday 14 August at 10.15 p.m.
Royal Albert Hall

Ligeti: Poème symphonique (8 mins)
Berio: Sequenza V (8 mins)
Xenakis: Phlegra (12 mins)
Jonathan Harvey: Mortuos plango, vivos voco (9 mins)
Louis Andriessen: De snelheid (18 mins)
Cage: 4' 33 (4:33 mins)

Byron Fulcher trombone
Sound Intermedia
London Sinfonietta
London Sinfonietta Academy Ensemble
André Ridder conductor

This pocket history of post-war music, reflecting Radio 3's Fifty Modaern Classics, opens with Ligeti's playful Poème for 100 ticking metronomes. In Berio's solo trombone extravaganza the player employs many extended techniques and at one point turns to the audience to ask, "Why?" Xenakis makes lively play out of rigorous patternings and Cage, whose centenary is marked this year - removes the idea of a sound source altogether. Before that notorious provocation, there's Jonathan Harvey's haunting electronic amalgam of a Winchester Cathedral bell and the voice of his boy chorister son, and Louis Andriessen's thrilling, hard-Minimalist musical clock.

[Flay]

No posts about this Prom? Not a word?

Just silence?

[jayne lee wilson]

Don't worry, I'm looking forward to it too! May have to hear it much later or tomorrow though...
but yes, already a big fan of the Harvey and the Andriessen - didn't Mark Wigglesworth premiere that with the BBCSO in the 1990s...?


EDIT: commissioned/premiered San Francisco SO 1983 (de Waart); maybe the BBC one was the UK first. A proms premiere here anyway.

[Bryn]

There was some discussion re. this concert some time before this thread was started, but I can't seem to find the relevant thread now.

[french frank]

A friend contributes:

"JLW and others may like to know that BBC Music Magazine included Andriessen's piece De Snelheid on their Volume 11 number 2 cover CD (October 2002). Not a Proms performance, but by the ASKO Ensemble, under Oliver Knussen."

(Bryn, of course, will have obtained this from his usual source for a good deal less than £1)

[underthecountertenor]

I only caught this from the Harvey to the end, but it sounded excellent (and in very well engineered sound too). But poor Tom Service got his knickers in a terrible twist when introducing Ridder back to the stage to conduct the Andriessen. Reminiscent of David Coleman on Grandstand with earpiece issues.

[Bax-of-Delights]

Anthony Craig writes in The Grampohone:

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/blog/the-gramophone-blog/proms-go-from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous

[heliocentric]

I can still remember the time when the Gramophone - "The world's authority on classical music since 1923" - (to name only this) thought it a good idea to commission reviews and articles from people who knew and were interested in the repertoire they were writing about, so that someone reading it would be more knowledgeable for doing so. Personally I still think that's a good idea, but it seems to have gone out of fashion in the meantime.

"Antony Craig started going to Covent Garden in 1962 and has probably been to more than 1000 performances at the Royal Opera House alone. He also finds time to sing in two choirs and is Production Editor of Gramophone."

Good for him.

[jayne lee wilson]

The BBC should have used of one their 24 Olympic feeds to give us a tele-cast of this Prom 44, as those metronomes in Ligeti's Poeme Symphonique (were there 100? A bit hard to count them on the radio...) may have been more amusing seen as well as heard. Likewise the Clown who - pausing between playing and singing through the trombone in Berio's Sequenza 5 - suddenly asks, despairing of himself and his audience "why!". After such dis-embodied clickings, squeaks and groans, a home listener might have felt like a Confucian fool, "pretending to be receiving wisdom" from the venerable gods of the avant-garde.

So - lack of pictures (courtesy some dull dog in SIS/BBC, who was probably ignorant of the high potential for visual amusement), one black star.
Gabbled and verbose introductions & needlessly lengthy interviews - 2 black stars.

But wait... after the Clocks and Clowns (see what I did there?) we ran headlong into Xenakis' Phlegra, an explosion of instrumental exuberance, colour and yes, melody (" wind arborescences" as the note says) which might have been a Symphonies of Wind + Strings from a distant planet. Don't fight it, feel it.

It would be easy to call Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, the heart of the performance but that would be to cleave, too predictably, to the most overtly humanised or expressive, even Romantic piece as the centre of gravity. Gorgeously realised, yet how remote and inhuman those metallic bell-resonances sound, as the chorister's voice is subsumed into their spectral humming.

Flung to the opposite extreme, the "machine" of De Snelheid ("Velocity") should grip even more tightly than Bolero, Clapping Music, or Shaker Loops. In this performance it did all that! Again one longed to watch those 3 orchestras and the frantic clacking of the 2 percussionists on their wood blocks, but I long even more for those who kept away, especially those who would always keep away, to give this a go. If you don't, you miss one of the all-time, heart-in-mouth, hold-your-breath Great Endings!

4'33 found me back in Confucian-fool mode again, this time thinking how clever I was, lying awake at night, savouring the sound of traffic on wet roads, rumblings of container-loading or metal-rendering from the nearby docks, long before Mr.Cage told me to. It's These You Have Loved, Your Hundred Best Sounds.

OK - churl churl, but that final iPhone-inspired sound projection mash-up (the conductor giving the cue for the audience to send each other texts) didn't really work. Awfully quiet, wasn't it? Great idea - but probably needs 3000 phones to make a scene.

BBC Proms, SIS, R3 - cut the talk to the bare minimum - it only builds barriers to try to explain everything before the sound begins - and for heaven's sake get the cameras in on the venerable, visual classics of the avant-garde. Try a 19:30 start. The old dogs long since ceased to bite, but if audiences boo and leave the hall - it might get you in the papers. And you won't even need to win a medal.

[heliocentric]

See what I mean? Jayne's post is much more informative than that faux-bemused buftonspeak in the Gramophone.

I would recommend the Xenakis piece to anyone who's of the opinion that non-tonal music has no "logic". Everything that happens in this piece is a clear consequence of what comes before - not the only possible consequence to be sure, but after all we live in a world governed by quantum physics rather than divine prescription.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

See what I mean? Jayne's post is much more informative than that faux-bemused buftonspeak in the Gramophone.

I would recommend the Xenakis piece to anyone who's of the opinion that non-tonal music has no "logic". Everything that happens in this piece is a clear consequence of what comes before - not the only possible consequence to be sure, but after all we live in a world governed by quantum physics rather than divine prescription.

[Roehre]

I would recommend the Xenakis piece to anyone who's of the opinion that non-tonal music has no "logic". Everything that happens in this piece is a clear consequence of what comes before - not the only possible consequence to be sure, but after all we live in a world governed by quantum physics rather than divine prescription.

[ahinton]

I think that Jayne should get out more - but only long enough to land herself that decently paid job as a music critic that she so clearly deserves!...

[heliocentric]

Am I the only one who thinks the Harvey is overplayed? (I mean relative to other electronic music of course.) Leaving aside my personal opinion that it isn't that great anyway (and leans heavily on Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge, composed a quarter of a century before it), there are so many other beautiful electronic pieces around, by British composers if that's a factor.

[MrGongGong]

Am I the only one who thinks the Harvey is overplayed? (I mean relative to other electronic music of course.) Leaving aside my personal opinion that it isn't that great anyway (and leans heavily on Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge, composed a quarter of a century before it), there are so many other beautiful electronic pieces around, by British composers if that's a factor.

There are many other wonderful acousmatic pieces
though I don't think it's "overplayed" more that many of the other possible ones are Underplayed
which, given that some of the greatest electroacoustic composers in the world are from the UK is a sad state of affairs IMV

The comparisons with Gesang are obvious but surely that would be true for ANY piece with childrens voices ?
to my ears its much less "Bagpuss mice" than the Stockhausen