Prom 1: 15.07.16 - First Night of the Proms

[Sir Velo]

I'm not so sure, TBH, having covered quite a few TV OB's from the Proms. It really is up to the presenter as to when they stop/start and unfortunately KD has no idea as to the right moment.

I agree with you. It's very rare that a producer (who frequently is no more than a glorified runner) would have the gravitas/seniority to override a presenter of KD's "stature", let alone demand that they chime in seconds after the final note.

No, you only have to look at the worst offenders: KD, CB-H and SK; all of whom clearly love the sound of their own voices above any consideration of good taste.

[alycidon]

No, you only have to look at the worst offenders: KD, CB-H and SK; all of whom clearly love the sound of their own voices above any consideration of good taste.

Something I have been wishing to articulate for some time, so I agree with you wholeheartedly.

[Master Jacques]

My take on the Prokofiev, sitting in the hall, was that (with the exception of the Lament) I wished it had been sung in English rather than Russian. The chorus sang well, but with their heads in their scores to read the transliteration; so it's no wonder that the choral sections were a bit uncommunicative. Their singing was tasteful to a fault, and though the wonderful performance of Olga Borodina raised the performance well above routine, only the orchestra-only sections (notably the start of Battle on the Ice) made much of the impact this film score can (and should) make.

The Elgar was memorable in every bar, fresh without being mannered: for me, many of its exponents have the word "elegiac" too firmly fixed in their heads. What Sol Gabetta did, was to bring out the noble, stoic, angry and (yes) mercurially witty aspects of this aphoristic work. It never pays to make too much of a lugubrious meal of this concerto, in my opinion. This was exhilarating, intelligent and powerfully pointed. Bravo!

The Tchaikovsky seemed to me a somewhat stodgy opener, with the strings often dragging and without sufficient sense of momentum from the podium. I suspect it had been under-rehearsed.

[Petrushka]

Am I the only one to find Last Night speeches mostly excruciatingly embarrassing? Conductors tend not to be the best verbal entertainers, Andre Previn aside, and most are best saying nothing.

Of recentish exponents only Sir Andrew Davis has had the knack of entering into the spirit of the occasion.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Am I the only one to find Last Night speeches mostly excruciatingly embarrassing?

No.

Conductors tend not to be the best verbal entertainers, Andre Previn aside, and most are best saying nothing.

Of recentish exponents only Sir Andrew Davis has had the knack of entering into the spirit of the occasion.

[Petrushka]

Not read the entire thread but, in the hall, we had no idea that the French National Anthem was to start the programme, hence the sluggishness in the audience standing.

An announcement from the stage would have been better.

[pureimagination]

I too was in the hall. No announcement was needed for La Marseillaise. It was unexpected leading to a few seconds delay before those that could stood [from some of the comments you would think that minutes had passed before people stood!].
I think overall the First Night was really enjoyable. For those that want a du Pré type performance of Elgar you have the cd/vinyl etc. I too was a little underwhelmed at first but on hearing it a second time I found Sol Gabetta's performance/interpretation very enjoyable - subtle differences [sorry for my lack of musical terminology] but nothing that took anything away from her version [and an interestingly enjoyable encore].
I found the choir very impressive [and why not?] and Olga Borodina's entrance/performance/exit perfect.

[Sir Velo]

Re Nevsky, I think a lot of the comments miss the point that this is film music. As such it is heard out of context and one has to accept that what works as visual accompaniment does not always hold the attention in the concert hall. Having said that, the Battle on the Ice is one of Prokofiev's greatest (and loudest!) inventions: the menacing brass; the slashing strings; the teutonic knights were soon careering through this listener's living room in all their hell bent fury! On that note, great sound reproduction from the BBC engineers who seem to have upped their game for this season.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Re Nevsky, I think a lot of the comments miss the point that this is film music. As such it is heard out of context and one has to accept that what works as visual accompaniment does not always hold the attention in the concert hall.

But in that context, it is performed and presented as a Concert work, and is therefore to be responded to critically (either positively or negatively) in that context. It isn't
"film music" in a concert performance, only when the film is shown. There is no "point" being "missed" if "the comments" focus on this - the question is whether or not the composer was wise to offer his score for concert hall use; and that depends entirely on whether people enjoy it as a concert experience or not.


(RVW's Sinfonia Antartica has been mentioned on another Thread; here, the composer was wise enough to take elements from one of his film scores and refashion it to make it suitable for symphonic treatment, producing a completely successful concert work as a result. I don't know if Prokofiev did this with Nevsky?)

[edashtav]

Film music would fail its primary purpose if it commanded complete intellectual absorption. To be fit for purpose, the complexity of structure and musical thought exhibited by absolute musical masterpieces need to diluted to allow, if not domination by, at least a partnership with, the cinematic elements of the film. Playing film music in the concert hall risks an attention deficit. When I hear Nesky, my mind fills the vacuum with remembered images from Eisenstein's masterpiece. As a concert work, the cantata fails because of a structure dominated by telling a pictorial story and insufficient musical density.

[Carlos V]

I don't agree with edashtav here. Alexander Nevsky (the cantata) isn't simpler musically than, let's say, Pergolesi's Stabat Mater or Poulenc's Gloria. And film music can be complex and yet work both on screen and in the concert hall. Just think of the monolith scene in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odissey set to Ligeti's Lux Aeterna. I think the reasons behind the simplicity of most film scores must lay elsewhere. Maybe it's the way a film is edited, with the final copy being usually quite a bit different from the original storyboards and rough footage composers have to work with. Besides, if you were right, surely ballet and opera music would be similarly diluted, wouldn't they? And yet we have Rings and Sacres...

[bluestateprommer]

FWIW, on this side of the pond, the American Public Media program SymphonyCast chose this year's First Night, as they pretty much invariably have done for several years, as the opener for the block of concerts that SymphonyCast devotes to selected Proms:

http://www.yourclassical.org/programs/symphonycast/episodes

Somewhat OT with respect to the music-making of this Prom, on a personal level, one shocking fact in the talk pre-concert in the SymphonyCast broadcast was that Sol Gabetta's parents lost twin infants prior. SG told the story of her mother telling her father, after they lost the twins:

"She said to my father: 'I would like to have another child, because this family cannot end like this, so negative like this'. She says to my father: 'you know, if she's a girl, the name, it's absolutely clear, it will be Sol, because, for me, it's the sun, which is coming back home'."

On balance, I'm with Carlos V in this particular discussion on "film music", with respect to Alexander Nevsky. There is no harm in music evoking images from a film, or a story (e.g. Richard Strauss and Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, or Don Juan, to name but a microscopic sampling), if the musical invention is strong enough to compel attention away from film images. Most movie music doesn't do that, to be fair. Having watched many, many old Hollywood movies on cable TV in younger days, most music there wouldn't stand up on its own. Alexander Nevsky is the very notable exception to that thesis.

[pureimagination]

Sorry bluestateprommer but I can't disagree with you more. To suggest that the music composed for films/movies doesn't stand up on it's own [that it needs the images to work] is such a broad dismissal of the genre. A few examples (from the hundreds I could chose), that I suggest do work in isolation are Miklós Rózsa's score for Spellbound, Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo. I could go on and on and on... I know the Proms is thought of as a 'classical music festival' but I have no problem with the inclusion of music composed for film. Of course there are some pieces which straddle both genres - RVW's Sinfonia Antartica written for the film Scott of the Antarctic is one example and there are examples of classical pieces used in film that add to the overall impact immensely e.g. Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No.2 in Brief Encounter. They are still classical pieces if out of context. Some of the examples I have given are from composers who wrote not only for film but also composed symphonies etc so I guess they didn't concern themselves too much with which genre they composed for.

[Roslynmuse]

For one reason or another I'm only just catching up with the Proms, just as they are about to expire on iPlayer. I'd seen some of the posts here and wasn't expecting much from it. I find the Tchaikovsky, for all its familiarity, an intriguing piece, and this performance, despite a few orchestral lapses, brought out for me the conflict of tonalities that T uses. I was surprised, but persuaded, by the slower than usual tempo for the 'big tune'. I was less persuaded by the Elgar. Many years ago I was accompanying a cellist in this piece in a masterclass being given by the cellist of the Vermeer Quartet, Marc Johnson. He said to the student that of course everyone has du Pré's recording in their ears and the difficulty is to see the score without hearing that particular way of playing the notes - and to work from the starting point of thinking about and playing what Elgar wrote, rather than what we think he wrote. (I remember being surprised when I saw the score for the first time by how simple it all looks on the page...) That is the start of a process that may involve walking around the piece in many different directions, throwing some ideas away, maybe coming back to our starting point, maybe understanding why du Pré (or whoever) played it the way they did. As listeners we impose our own preconceptions in just the same way that performers do, and project our own suspicions onto the motivation behind interpretative decisions we don't like. I didn't much like this performance because I felt it came to a standstill at too many points, with slow tempi in mts 1 and 3 and near the end of 4 - impossibly slow there, I felt. I suppose that for me if the opening bars feel unnatural or over-interpreted or self-conscious (and I realise this is completely subjective - almost) then I'm less likely to feel favourably towards what follows; and that was the case with this performance. (Those Elgar commas - are they really meant to hold up the action as much as they did here?) Gabetta makes a wonderful sound and has a marvellous range, but this didn't ring true to me, I'm afraid. The encore was slight but quirkily enjoyable. As for the Prokofiev - I'm not his greatest admirer, but I rather like this piece; unlike some, I think it works well as a concert piece - not a work of great profundity, but one to conjure images in the mind through expert orchestration and a sequence of ideas that are strongly characterised, even if they are not developed (someone mentioned the Poulenc Gloria, and despite the difference in mood and subject matter(!) I think there is a valid comparison to be made between the two pieces - Poulenc has strong ideas, vividly and energetically (or seductively) presented, but almost never developed. See Tchaikovsky too). The performance was perfectly satisfactory - the orchestra was extrovert and the chorus sounded involved, even if they didn't look it (I didn't watch). One thing I do find odd about the piece is the limited use of the chorus in the longest movement - it always feels as if P had forgotten he had a chorus. It's just occurred to me that the piece that perhaps provides the closest point of contact is Walton's Henry V music, in the Christopher Palmer incarnation with chorus and narrator. There is a very similar battle scene there too, of course. It's not a piece I want to hear very often (Nevsky) but I'm happy with a performance like this once in a while. I should also have said that in some ways the best orchestral playing came with La Marseillaise at the start - markedly tighter ensemble here than elsewhere.