Prom 50 - 19.08.13: White, Barry, Rzewski & Feldman

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

10.15pm – c. 11.30pm
Royal Albert Hall

John White
Chord-Breaking Machine (10 mins)
Gerald Barry
No other people. (12 mins)
UK Premiere
Frederic Rzewski
Piano Concerto (20 mins)
BBC Commission, World Premiere
Feldman
Coptic Light (28 mins)

Frederic Rzewski piano
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov conductor

Ilan Volkov brings his spirit of adventure to this late night Prom, featuring music as beautiful as it is ground breaking.

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performs music by a quartet of visionary and idiosyncratic composers, including two premieres. John White?s Chord-breaking Machine could be seen as belonging to a tradition of experimental English minimalists, deconstructing musical material into its constituent parts and reforming as repetitive machine structures; Irish maverick Gerald Barry?s No Other People, tonight receiving its first UK performance, also draws on repetition and seemingly simple musical figures, but here to create strongly contrasting canvases of bold, wild and stark music.

Frederic Rzewski?s BBC Radio 3-commissioned Piano Concerto, tonally kaleidoscopic and stylistically far reaching, receives its world premiere, with the composer as soloist. And the concert concludes with Morton Feldman?s late masterpiece, Coptic Light, a meditation for orchestra: a beatific and spiritual end to this late-night Prom.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

MrGongGong:

Enjoy!

[Tevot]

Sounds wonderful...

I'll definitely be tuning in

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

MrGongGong:

Enjoy!

MrGG is a fan of Barry White?!

[Tevot]

Good to see Marty Feldman making an appearance too

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Good to see Marty Feldman making an appearance too

- bet nobody can do anything silly with "Rzewski", though!

I'm really looking forward to this Prom - I only know the Feldman, which is wonderful.

[edashtav]

- bet nobody can do anything silly with "Rzewski", though!

I'm really looking forward to this Prom - I only know the Feldman, which is wonderful.

I've got my money on Katie D. turning Rzewski into rhyming slang.

Fine Prom, though

[Bryn]

At the risk of crowding the place out, Ilan will be playing (most likely his violin) at Cafe Oto the previous evening. I have to admit I did not respond with particular enthusiasm to his improvisations at Kings Place last year, but I will certainly be there on Sunday evening, and at the RAH on Monday night too. A John White work at the Proms is very long overdue. I think the last time he was featured there was in 1972 (as a performer in an arrangement of Paragraphs 1 and 2 from Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning, in which I too, and I think at least one other contributor here, participated as performer).

[Oops, turns out John White was also playing eupho' in Rzewski's Les moutons de Panurge, 2 years later.]

[Roehre]

I'm really looking forward to this Prom - I only know the Feldman, which is wonderful.

Makes two of us

[amateur51]

I've got my money on Katie D. turning Rzewski into rhyming slang.

Fine Prom, though

I think I may take in the first few minutes standing outside my block of flats listening for gales of laughter to coincide with the Golden Tonsilled-One's first attempts at Rzewski

[Bryn]

I think I may take in the first few minutes standing outside my block of flats listening for gales of laughter to coincide with the Golden Tonsilled-One's first attempts at Rzewski

Nah, I'm sure Ilan will put here right in advance, or perhaps Fred himself will do the honours.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Is she allowed out so late? Isn't this SM-P's territory? Or even, (please) Robert Worby's?

[Bryn]

Is she allowed out so late? Isn't this SM-P's territory? Or even, (please) Robert Warby's?

Robert Worby, please. Since she is a sometime piano duet partner of John White (they play as "WWII", perhaps Sarah Walker, though I know she is not a particular fan of Feldman's music?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Robert Worby

Oops! Corrected with apologies.

[PJPJ]

A splendid concert - do catch it on iPlayer if you missed it. I hope it was well-attended.....