Prom 54 (23.8.12): Davies, Delius & Shostakovich

[Dave2002]

?

Espliqué moi, s'il vous plait.

E V

Perhaps I got this wrong (and I see you have my uncorrected text ...).

I wondered if you (Extra Vaganza) and Volti Subito could be the same person, since you're both in the same area with a similar number of posts etc. Apologies if I'm wrong.

[salymap]

... just how I used to feel sitting in the 'stag line' at our local ballroom.

Thank you for that, Salymap. What does 'bestio' mean?

E V

A greeting used by a recently departed and popular member. Used to you, probably 'what are you up to now?'

[Extra Vaganza]

Perhaps I got this wrong (and I see you have my uncorrected text ...).

I wondered if you (Extra Vaganza) and Volti Subito could be the same person, since you're both in the same area with a similar number of posts etc. Apologies if I'm wrong.

Well, we are a couple of newbies, joining at about the same time, but I have followed the message boards for some time, whereas Volto Subito obviously hasn't and might need a little guidance in the strange environment of the message boards, but you will see that our interests and musical backgrounds are vastly different.

Possibly we have met. Time will reveal all.
E V

[Extra Vaganza]

A greeting used by a recently departed and popular member. Used to you, probably 'what are you up to now?'

Trying to decide between Tchaikovsky and Britten for tonight's entertainment. I think on this occasion I might go for the latter to start with at least.

I'm not very keen on Alice Coote's voice and anyway, I feel strongly that the Mahler songs should be sung by a baritone. There cannot be many wayfaring sopranos even in Austria. I could swap over to the Manfred symphony if I've had enough of BB for one evening.

E V

[salymap]

Trying to decide between Tchaikovsky and Britten for tonight's entertainment. I think on this occasion I might go for the latter to start with at least.

I'm not very keen on Alice Coote's voice and anyway, I feel strongly that the Mahler songs should be sung by a baritone. There cannot be many wayfaring sopranos even in Austria. I could swap over to the Manfred symphony if I've had enough of BB for one evening.

E V

Yes,I can't listen to that Mahler sung by a woman. The translation used to be 'Songs of wayfaring LAD' not
lady. I shalllisten to the Manfred Symphony, only recently discovered by me.

[Boilk]

[PMD] came on at the end for an accolade wearing an attractive bluish tie.

There's undeniably something bluish about the colour blue

Since this work was dedicated to the Queen in her diamond jubilee year, and PMD has generally been hailed as our greatest living composer since Tipett's death, this work should surely have been performed at the musically-themed closing ceremony of the Olympics - showcasing to the world Britain's great musical treasury.

Have yet to listen, but always hoping that a new PMD symphony can again match what he achieved with No.2 ... as far back as 1980.

[pilamenon]

It wasn't "dreadful" or "Emperor's New Clothes", for goodness sake, but I was pretty disappointed by the Maxwell Davies work, too. I've attended two other of his more recent works at the Proms - Roma Amor and the Violin Concerto - and was gripped by the musical drama of both. They both went down a storm, too. Last night, the applause seemed much less enthusiastic, even with the composer on the stage.

The slower central section had more impact, but the early interjections of the brass sextet merely felt corny, and in the latter part of the work I wasn't always clear what their role was versus the other brass. Overall, it just didn't speak to me. I suppose I should read the programme notes and give it another listen.

Agree that Tasmin Little's tone might have been fuller in the violin concerto, it was perhaps a subdued mood that she was aiming for. A lovely work, though.

Shostakovich 10 was excellent. Petrenko always a great conductor to watch, and he has really lifted this orchestra up a level. The third and fourth movements were particularly fine, and the soloists of the RLPO outstanding, with the chief horn and the piccolo player absolutely tremendous.

One negative last night - coughing and spluttering galore. Coins dropping. People on their mobiles, including Prommers. A very restless and fidgety audience.

[teamsaint]

Yes,I can't listen to that Mahler sung by a woman. The translation used to be 'Songs of wayfaring LAD' not
lady. I shalllisten to the Manfred Symphony, only recently discovered by me.

Good work discovering the manfred.........
Though it is a bold claim, as I have had a copy for ages...did you really discover it ?!

Cracking stuff it is in any case...a current TS fave !!great motorway music !

[jayne lee wilson]

Btw: for the Collins label the symphonies 1-6 were recorded, so a second hand copy of the sixth should be available somewhere.

Thanks Roehre - It is, but the cheapest is still around £20, and as Naxos are shortly to release 4&5, they should get around to it soon. The 5th is especially interesting in in its concision, just over 25', and a flowing, continuous structure of many short sections (including one which sounds like a Red Indian war-dance!). Much percussion too, but otherwise rather more playful than No.9. As for 7 and 8...

I wouldn't expect any audible presence of Sibelius 7 in Max 9, but the parallels are there - the recurrent fanfare from the introduction is pivotal (though more fluidly integrated than the one in Sibelius 7); those wisps of Haydn are woven into the later textures of the symphony even more than the lyrical ideas just after the Sibelius 7 opening are in that piece - yet one could observe a distant parallel in the contrast offered. Above all the sheer intensity of expression, and a sense of finality, even of a summing-up of a symphonic journey (pace Max's ideas for a 10th...). But I wonder, if we whizzed back in a time-machine to the 1920s, what we would make of No.7, if we'd only heard, say, 1&2 and 5? I think Max's 9th is even more compressed for its Sibelian 23' span, and as I've suggested has a density of motivic integration which challenges even the most welcoming of ears.

Unlike Heliocentric, I did feel some rapprochement with the intensity of the great 60s masterpieces, especially the 2nd Tavener Fantasia and Worldes Blis - and I had missed that in later works, especially the Strathclyde concertos, which seemed to consider the players rather too much! But a composer has to move on, and given his fecundity you wonder what could have followed those 1960s eruptions, and then the lyrical intensity of the 1970s Orkney works like Image, Reflection, Shadow. Perhaps working closely with orchestras is, as Smash Hits used to say, a double-edged sword...

[heliocentric]

I think we're going to have to agree to differ, Jayne. But maybe I should get to know his post-1970s pieces a bit better. An Orkney Wedding... was a sort of final straw for me and I never felt quite the same about his work after that.

[gurnemanz]

One negative last night - coughing and spluttering galore. Coins dropping. People on their mobiles, including Prommers. A very restless and fidgety audience.

We were standing in the arena: Someone nearby started fiddling with a smartphone during the Delius. I twice heard a phone tune go off. A flash went off from on high twice during Shostakovich.

[edashtav]

Well, I'm sorry to say I didn't experience the intensity described by Jayne. I haven't much liked anything I've heard from PMD since his second symphony, which is a long time ago now, it just all seems to me grey, tired and monotonous, an impression which was somehow not mitigated by the interruptions by extraneous material in the 9th symphony - no comparison whatsoever with the startlingly expressive use of pastiche in his music from the 1960s and 70s.

I'm closer to Lancashire Lass (?) Jayne than you helio. I'm afraid that it's taken me a day or two to catch up with this fine Prom.

Maxwell Davies reaches 9 symphonies. A time there was when penning just one was taken as a symptom that Max’s arteries were furring and that middle age complacency was sapping his radicalism & creativity. And, oh dear, Max invoked Sibelius as a guide & helpmate, long before Sibelius software converted cutting-edge thoughts into beautiful scores. “Max is maxing out on tonality,” thought the avant-garde as they interred his remains without erecting a headstone.

The new work is akin to a Military Symphony , a warning for our troubled times. Here, the extra brass and percussion are not four-square and disciplined as in Haydn, but disruptive elements hell-bent on destroying our security. They represent the illegitimacy of war as a weapon, or, even worse, the evil of illegitimate war-mongering. Here the brass players are banal like Mahler recalling earlier scores by Max, there they have the force of the side drum attempting to replace order with chaos in Nielsen’s 5th symphony heard earlier in the Proms’ week, and, at other times, the forces march to different drummers inspired by Charles Ives. Occasionally, I caught a whiff of Lancashire "Corry-style" – back to Max’s suburban roots before Sandy Goehr conceived of a Manchester School for egg-heads.

It was both entertaining and alarming. (I was thrilled by the power of the RLPO performance under Petrenko.) Not Max on auto-pilot churning Strathclyde concerti and quartets as if he was the Darius Milhaud de nos jours. Except for an elegiac, bleached out passage that was like walking across a battlefield, I detected little Sibelius. Full marks, Max, for recapturing your brassy radicalism.
As another Master of the King’s Musick wrote, “Things to Come”??

[Roehre]

I'm closer to Lancashire Lass (?) Jayne than you helio. I'm afraid that it's taken me a day or two to catch up with this fine Prom.

Maxwell Davies reaches 9 symphonies. A time there was when penning just one was taken as a symptom that Max’s arteries were furring and that middle age complacency was sapping his radicalism & creativity. And, oh dear, Max invoked Sibelius as a guide & helpmate, long before Sibelius software converted cutting-edge thoughts into beautiful scores. “Max is maxing out on tonality,” thought the avant-garde as they interred his remains without erecting a headstone.

The new work is akin to a Military Symphony , a warning for our troubled times. Here, the extra brass and percussion are not four-square and disciplined as in Haydn, but disruptive elements hell-bent on destroying our security. They represent the illegitimacy of war as a weapon, or , even work, the evil of illegitimate war-mongering. Here the brass players are banal like Mahler recalling earlier scores by Max, there they have the force of the side drum attempting to replace order with chaos in Nielsen’s 5th symphony heard earlier in the Proms’ week, and, at other times, the forces march to different drummers inspired by Charles Ives. Occasionally, I caught a whiff of Lancashire – back to Max’s suburban roots before Sandy Goehr conceived of a Manchester School for egg-heads.

It was both entertaining and alarming. (I was thrilled by the power of the RLPO performance under Petrenko.) Not Max on auto-pilot churning Strathclyde concerti and quartets as if he was the Darius Milhaud de nos jours. Except for an elegiac, bleached out passage that was like walking across a battlefield, I detected little Sibelius. Full marks, Max, for recapturing your brassy radicalism. As another Master of the King’s Musick wrote, “Things to Come”?

Btw, Worldes Blis is a symphony in all but name too (Max called this "a kind of Mahler 14 or so"), which makes it ten symphonies tnen (not unlike Mahler....)

[Serial_Apologist]

Is my memory deceiving me? At the time of the Antarctic Symphony, I'm pretty sure we heard Max declaring with full certainty that he would not be writing any more symphonies, and that, if one listened to the conclusion of No 8, one could go from there right back to the start of No 1, with which it is structurally connected, and re-commence the whole cycle.

[jayne lee wilson]

I'm closer to Lancashire Lass (?) Jayne than you helio. I'm afraid that it's taken me a day or two to catch up with this fine Prom.

Maxwell Davies reaches 9 symphonies. A time there was when penning just one was taken as a symptom that Max’s arteries were furring and that middle age complacency was sapping his radicalism & creativity. And, oh dear, Max invoked Sibelius as a guide & helpmate, long before Sibelius software converted cutting-edge thoughts into beautiful scores. “Max is maxing out on tonality,” thought the avant-garde as they interred his remains without erecting a headstone.

The new work is akin to a Military Symphony , a warning for our troubled times. Here, the extra brass and percussion are not four-square and disciplined as in Haydn, but disruptive elements hell-bent on destroying our security. They represent the illegitimacy of war as a weapon, or, even worse, the evil of illegitimate war-mongering. Here the brass players are banal like Mahler recalling earlier scores by Max, there they have the force of the side drum attempting to replace order with chaos in Nielsen’s 5th symphony heard earlier in the Proms’ week, and, at other times, the forces march to different drummers inspired by Charles Ives. Occasionally, I caught a whiff of Lancashire "Corry-style" – back to Max’s suburban roots before Sandy Goehr conceived of a Manchester School for egg-heads.

It was both entertaining and alarming. (I was thrilled by the power of the RLPO performance under Petrenko.) Not Max on auto-pilot churning Strathclyde concerti and quartets as if he was the Darius Milhaud de nos jours. Except for an elegiac, bleached out passage that was like walking across a battlefield, I detected little Sibelius. Full marks, Max, for recapturing your brassy radicalism.
As another Master of the King’s Musick wrote, “Things to Come”??

Fascinating comments and parallels Ed.... the battlefield evocation also occurred to me, thinking about this symphony and the DSCH 7 today. I recalled Wellington at the end of the film, 'Waterloo' as he rides slowly through the mud, smoke and carnage: 'the saddest thing after a battle lost, is a battle won'. How often that has been forgotten since.

Now Max has reached No.9, it's worth recalling his characteristic comment about why he called No.1 a symphony at all - 'because it marked the beginning of the possibility of an orchestra competence'.