BBC Proms 2023: Prom 55 - Simon: Four Black American Dances; Stravinsky: Petrushka (1947); Gershwin: Concerto in F; Ravel: La valse (Thibaudet / BSO / Nelsons)

26th August 2023
Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom

CARLOS SIMON Four Black American Dances
STRAVINSKY Petrushka (1947 version)
GERSHWIN Concerto in F
RAVEL La valse

Jean‐Yves Thibaudet (piano)
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons (conductor)



A night of intoxicating rhythms with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons. On paper, at least. The more I listen to Stravinsky's "Petrushka" (1947 version tonight), the less I enjoy it as a concert piece, because a lot of mediocre conductors perform it without considering its ballet origin and it ends up sounding like a patchy orchestral mess. Nelsons was great to remind us of the narratives, but focused so much on the very fine orchestral playing at the expense of the dynamic, "physical" side of the music, which made it stale and tedious as it went on. Was it the performance or the score to blame? I think it's both. Gershwin's "Concerto in F" received a rare outing after the interval. I always wonder, how much abandonment should one play Gershwin with? Do you play it like jazz and improvise? But "Concerto in F" is the more note-perfect side of Gershwin. Jean-Yves Thibaudet gave a punchy, rhythmically incisive performance that was easily more impressive than his 2010 recording. He was always (literally physically) searching for introspective dialogues with the orchestral solos, but the orchestra did not necessarily reciprocate generously. Individual players, particularly the brass, were impressive in bringing the spikes and the blues, but one could not help but think that American music might not be Nelsons' expertise. Those big tunes needed to be milked a lot more, for a start. The Prom started with "Four Black American Dances" by Carlos Simon who was in the audience tonight. It was easily one of the more successful and satisfying efforts to incorporate traditional black music into the symphonic form, from pacing to orchestrations. The rawness of the dances were highly enjoyable and the explosive applause to the composer was well justified. Ravel's apocalyptic "La valse" finished it all. It was suitably episodic, elegant and nicely paced. This was Nelsons at his best. If only that was also true for the Stravinsky.

BBC Proms 2023: Prom 47 - Ligeti: Concert românesc, Violin Concerto; Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23, Symphony No. 41 (Faust / Melnikov / Les Siècles / Roth)

20th August 2023
Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom

LIGETI Concert românesc
LIGETI Violin Concerto
MOZART Piano Concerto No. 23
MOZART Symphony No. 41

Isabelle Faust (violin)
Alexander Melnikov (fortepiano)
Les Siècles
François‐Xavier Roth (conductor)



Baffling programme tonight, this Harmonia Mundi Prom. François‐Xavier Roth's versatile Les Siècles paired Ligeti with Mozart. The early "Concert românesc" is the fun, melodic, folk-inspired Ligeti that is the beginning of everything but is often overshadowed by his later styles. It is one of the first orchestral scores I bought, in fact, and proves to be essential listening (along with "Musica ricercata") for the appreciation of his later styles. Even early on, Ligeti experiments with extreme instrumental timbres and orchestral dynamics, like getting the strings to play sul pont. or con sord. at pp against brass at ff. Achieving that extreme sonic contrast with such clarity in the RAH was nothing less than impressive. The "Violin Concerto" is the supreme culmination of almost all of Ligeti's styles, and goes beyond. It calls for unusual instrumentaion (ocarinas!), scordatura, folk(-inspired) music, micropolyphony, microtonal clusters, natural harmonics, you name it. Isabelle Faust gave a muscular, no-nonsense and frankly Romantic rendition of this concerto (c.f. PatKop) with Strasnoy's cadenza. I particularly enjoyed the highly expressive slow movement. It was an Expressionist solo matched by French elegance from the orchestra with very little rustic quality you'd expect from Ligeti. Everything was wrong in the right way and right in the wrong way and it's wonderful. Mozart's PC23 was a bit dodgy. Using a fortepiano in the middle of the orchestra without halving the strings in the RAH meant you could hardly hear the soloist even up close. That aside, Alexander Melnikov's very liberal rubatos, excessive mannerisms and occasional additional ornaments meant it was far from note perfect, to the point of being outright wrong and missing entries. Pretty unforgivable for a Mozart concerto, really. Also played with period instruments (and the second violin leader with a LH violin), "Symphony No. 41" was forceful. Enjoyable, if a bit heavy-handed with some questionable pauses in the minuet and trio. This Prom was a bit mixed. I love this orchestra, but I'd rather hear them pairing Rameau and Ravel with Boulez instead.

BBC Proms 2023: Prom 36 - Ligeti: Requiem, Lux aeterna; R. Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra (France / Presland / LPO / Gardner)

11th August 2023
Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom

LIGETI Requiem
LIGETI Lux aeterna
R. STRAUSS Also sprach Zarathustra

Jennifer France (soprano)
Clare Presland (mezzo-soprano)
Edvard Grieg Kor
Royal Northern College of Music Chamber Choir
London Philharmonic Choir
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Edward Gardner (conductor)



Ligeti celebration turned into a Stanley Kubrick homage evening - you know which pieces already - but I was told that both the Ligeti "Requiem" and R. Strauss' evergreen "Also sprach Zarathustra" were actually also used in the latest Barbie film. That explained all the selfie-taking and beer-drinking crowd tonight. Sound mass period Ligeti is something I only appreciate as I grow older. If you pay attention to the individual lines, they are highly ordered, finely constructed and incredibly expressive. If you then overlay them in a cascading manner, you generate a complex "micropolyphony" texture that Ligeti is famous for. At which point does over saturation of human emotions become stochastic noise? If we struggle to listen to it, is it more a biological limitation of human perception than the music being an intellectual mess? Hearing the "Introit" and especially the intricate "Kyrie" live is quite a spectacular experience. The terrifying and spiky "De die judicii sequentia" was ironically vindicated at the spot when a woman passed out half way. The soloists Jennifer France and Clare Presland were astonishing, punching their sharp lines through the atonal mass with little pitching help. I think the combined Edvard Grieg Kor, RNCM Chamber and LP choirs were a bit thin at the bass end of the vocal spectrum. Ligeti would have probably loved the joke of someone setting the alarm off at the last note of "Lacrimosa" (Ligeti himself apparently timed it with a stopclock when he watched "2001"). After the interval, Ligeti's choral transcendence experience was completed by "Lux aeterna" being sung from the Gallery in pitch dark. Seamless singing swirling under the roof of RAH. Very special experience. The Strauss that followed was a bit average, however. Big tunes, big gestures, nice phrasing and pace, it was a functional performance by the LPO under Edward Gardner, but I find places like the fugue in "Von der Wissenschaft" very murky and "Das Tanzlied" not invigorating enough, certainly being overshadowed by the preceding ecstatic climax of "Der Genesende". Not quite the transcendental übermensch journey Strauss envisaged, but I guess it's a potent antidote to Ligeti for most in the audience.

"Thus Spake Zarathustra" (1883 - 1885) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Multiple things in the past two years led me to Nietzsche - Wagner, for example - so I felt obliged to read his works. It was, however, a big mistake on my part to start with the famous "Also sprach Zarathustra". It is not necessarily the philosophical ideas that are difficult to comprehend. In fact, I prepared myself by reading discussions on Nietzsche before and alongside reading this book, without doing which this book was basically unreadable. There are multiple reasons why this book is not suitable as an entry point to Nietzsche or, for that matter, any philosophy. Being a "philosophical fiction", it is not a systematic or logical discussion on anything, but a series of entirely allegorical stories musing on the moon, volcanoes and tarantulas, preached by this fictional hermit Zarathustra. Nietzsche was famously critical of Christianity, almost all the values and morality that go with it, and everyone who practises it, yet he uses the same strategy as Christian preachers to spread these ideas, which makes it unclear if the text is meant to be a parody or not, or if it is meant to be read in one way or another. The bulk of the book is basically Zarathustra directly attacking every facet of morality as we know it. All the German poetries, wordplays and symphonic qualities that supposedly make this work "a masterpiece" are lost in the English translation anyway, so all that was left was a lengthy, repetitive, questionable and one-sided polemic text that does not serve as a good basis for any constructive discourse (and anyone who attempts is destined to end up with some messy arguments). As philosophy discussions generally do, it leaves more questions than answers - Was he a nihilist? Was he just anti-Christianity (Zarathustra seems to like ideas from the Orient) or an outright atheist? Is the notion of the übermensch meant to be a practical resolution to any of the "problems" he identified, that men basically need to surpass oneself by being as selfish as possible? As a scientist, it is interesting to compare these ideas against implications from statistical mechanics and the theory of evolution, but that's a discussion for another day. Let's see if the essays are more readable.

BBC Proms 2023: Prom 27 - Bellido: Perú negro; Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini; Walton: Belshazzar’s Feast (Wang / Hampson / BBC SO & Chorus / Mäkelä)

4th August 2023
Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom

JIMMY LÓPEZ BELLIDO Perú negro
RACHMANINOV Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
WALTON Belshazzar’s Feast

Yuja Wang (piano)
Thomas Hampson (baritone)
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Klaus Mäkelä (conductor)



The power couple Yuja Wang and Klaus Mäkelä performing Rachmaninov's much-loved "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini", what can go wrong? Nothing, if you like pyrotechnics. She has certainly come a long way since her 2011 recording with Abbado and it was evident in places like the mini cadenza of Var. XV that she has developed a significantly greater depth in her playing and matured from the sheer flurry of notes to more rounded phrasings and colourful tones. The problem was that the tempo was way too fast and they didn't allow slower moments like Var. XI to flourish, defeating its point of being a rhapsody. Quite often the over-zealous orchestra, fantastic as they were, drowned the soloist completely and tipped the sonic balance over. The units were individually impressive but the cohort gave the impression of being under-rehearsed - perhaps the time was instead invested in the mind-blowingly excellent "Belshazzar's Feast" by Walton that was to follow in the second half. It was 35 minutes of non-stop firework display for chorus and orchestra, and the BBC Chorus and Orchestra were on top form every moment. It was driven hard. The rhythms were incisive, the inappropriately erotic harmonies for a biblical story were all so well realised that every hair raised, and the diction from the chorus was impeccable throughout. Sure, the American baritone Thomas Hampson forcing a British accent with all the rolling Rs was quite amusing, but every time he sang he brought a breath of fresh air to the otherwise sumptuous-to-the-point-of-suffocating sound world. In the end, Mäkelä basically joined in to sing along till the end. It was a wild party. Please Decca, you need to record this. The evening started with Bellido's "Perú negro" which purports to celebrate the composer's home country's musical roots. Rhythmic orchestrations, mostly repetitive and harmonically stale, everything revolves around a single melody most of the time. Some find it entertaining, but unfortunately not my cup of tea. Impressive brass playing though.