Prom 43 (8.09.21) - Shostakovich & Mahler

[Alison]

I’m out of love with Mahler 5 and this performance didn’t really change matters. Not in the competition for best Prom but will have given pleasure to many. Excellently done Overture. Still recovering from last night anyhow.

[Barbirollians]

Gracious me - how come so many talented women in this orchestra ! John Wilson seems to have missed them .

[gradus]

I listened to the third movement and wondered again why in the huge space of the RAH conductors don't take the opportunity to have the horn calls sounding from afar, but that quibble aside I thought it really good and a credit to the players and conductor after such a difficult year for these fine musicians.

[Nick Armstrong]

BTW, from Nick A.'s images (so for NA, as the risk of asking the obvious, you were there then at the RAH? If so, great to know).

Actually I wasn’t. The photos were gleaned from the BBC Proms Twitter account…

I’m out of love with Mahler 5 and this performance didn’t really change matters. Not in the competition for best Prom but will have given pleasure to many. Excellently done Overture. Still recovering from last night anyhow.

Me too Alison. Perhaps for the same reasons as you, it left me cold…

[oddoneout]

Being a simple soul I just enjoyed listening to the music, accepting the occasional bodged note blip as part and parcel of the combination of the orchestra formation and live performance. I too wondered about amount of rehearsal time, as it wouldn't be just the basic note-bashing to sort out, but bedding in a new ensemble, added to which is getting back into "normal" playing again.
Worth doing though in my view, using a very public platform (in all senses) to illustrate the situation and certainly something rather more concrete and practical than the government response of at best just wringing hands and saying "oh yes it's very difficult" or more generally completely ignoring the problem.

[BBMmk2]

Unsure what to say really, noble effort in a noble cause but......in pure Mahler 5 performance terms, it wasn't really there tonight was it?

Finally everything comes down to the conductor, and this lacked a sure sense of shape or direction, there were too many approximations and imprecisions, smudged rhythms, a lack of dynamic articulation, for me to enjoy it on its own musical terms. (The adagietto was better though).
I wonder how much preparation time they had, as it often sounded more like a rehearsal than a finished presentation.

Was Mahler 5 just too ambitious for this recently-assembled group, or the occasion?
Apologies to the musicians.... I hope they found it heartening tonight before the cheering crowd, I hope they survive as artists and can still do what they love..... but I better leave it there.

Despite the noble idea of this particular concept, I’m in agreement with you, here. Too ambitious a work to rehearse in the space of time. I associate Wigglesworth with Shostakovich. Why not No.5, or 11?

[Ein Heldenleben]

Being a simple soul I just enjoyed listening to the music, accepting the occasional bodged note blip as part and parcel of the combination of the orchestra formation and live performance. I too wondered about amount of rehearsal time, as it wouldn't be just the basic note-bashing to sort out, but bedding in a new ensemble, added to which is getting back into "normal" playing again.
Worth doing though in my view, using a very public platform (in all senses) to illustrate the situation and certainly something rather more concrete and practical than the government response of at best just wringing hands and saying "oh yes it's very difficult" or more generally completely ignoring the problem.

I could not agree more . Any one with the slightest connection with the freelance world will of heard not of “difficulties” but people facing huge financial shortcomings , in some areas no work at all and , if you made more than 50k profit in a year , no bailout.

[Alison]

I’d be all for keeping this orchestra as a permanent fixture at the Proms and cutting out some of the international visitors.

[edashtav]

A handpicked bunch of top freelances could I suppose be called a scratch orchestra. It's a great idea anyway to give those whose work has been minimal in the preceding year a chance to work. And Mark Wigglesworth is probably the ideal conductor... technically superb without too much flapping...to make things clear. One or two bloops in the Shostakovitch, but so far the Mahler is going just fine. Maybe a 'Festival Orchestra' could become a regular feature of future Proms?

The concept was noble and generous: the BBC, that has had to support all of it ‘house’ orchestras that it it could not use efficiently during the Pandemic, was hiring freelancers that have suffered a meagre time. I suspect that to showcase them more fairly, more rehearsal time was needed, works should have been chosen that needed performance but were not so well known to a Proms audience, and, maybe, perhaps, a preparatory public performance away from ‘the bright lights’. All things that would have magnified costs several fold.

By chance, I attended an analagous event , at Stowe School some years a ago. A volunteer Scratch Orchestra assembled for a day or weekend of intensive rehearsals to play Mahler’s 5th (!) under the Conductor James Judd. I got as much from listening to the rehearsals as I did from the evening performance which contained, like the Proms Festival Orchestra, felicities interspersed with ‘ work in progress’. (That was ‘back in the day’ when Mahler was not ubiquitous on British Concert programmes.)

To do it well takes resources and, probably, sponsors with deep pockets. I found this on the Net…. James Judd still at the centre of Events, but do take a peep at the price tag.

‘Most striking is the $1 million awarded to the Miami Music Project, an initiative that marks the local reappearance of conductor James Judd, former music director of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra. Judd, who has kept a low profile since moving back to Fort Lauderdale several years ago, and Richard Harris, a former trombone player for the New World Symphony, have proposed a three-year musical outreach program to public schools. The project will culminate in a two-week arts festival of professional musicians and students to be presented at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami.’

[Barbirollians]

I’m out of love with Mahler 5 and this performance didn’t really change matters. Not in the competition for best Prom but will have given pleasure to many. Excellently done Overture. Still recovering from last night anyhow.

It won't surprise you Alison to know that whenever I feel like that I go back to the Barbirolli recording >

[Nick Armstrong]

I’d be all for keeping this orchestra as a permanent fixture at the Proms and cutting out some of the international visitors.

[Alison]

It won't surprise you Alison to know that whenever I feel like that I go back to the Barbirolli recording >

Ok Barbs, I’ll take that on board and give it a go.

A symphony I loved to death as a student, now put in same file as Tchaikovsky 5 as delivering fewer rewards in middle age…

[oddoneout]

I’d be all for keeping this orchestra as a permanent fixture at the Proms and cutting out some of the international visitors.

I think it's likely that there will be changes as the many issues involved in touring large groups such as orchestras - practical, administrative, financial and, increasingly environmental, have to be weighed up. One of the orchestras family members play with had been starting the review process even before covid hit.
For the immediate future the problems caused by a certain other event in this country will also have an effect and if that also means more opportunities such as this for resident musicians then that's a positive, even if tainted somewhat by its origin.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I’d be all for keeping this orchestra as a permanent fixture at the Proms and cutting out some of the international visitors.

I don't think I'd go that far. The opportunity to see and hear the world's great orchestras is something to be cherished. There's enough dead wood at the Proms to find space for international orchestras and this one.

[jayne lee wilson]

Anyone out-of-love with Mahler 5 and needing a refresher course -

https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/mahler-symphony-no-5-gurzenich-orchester-koln-francois-xavier-roth/3149020933008

....superbly done in excellent sound, with the orchestra that gave the public premiere in 1904.
Even the seasoned Mahlerian David Gutman (with the hallowed VPO/Bernstein among the references) was won over (Gramophone 3/18).
("Strings Super-Articulate"....."sharp-eared and brilliant"...."incisive"... etc)

Sample it anywhere and you'll soon see what he means. A recording that serves the music wonderfully well.