From our critic in residence, Alastair Macaulay:
How startling and how refreshing to read in a 2025 BBC Proms programme that Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, in its entirety, received only two Proms performances (in 1902 and 1927) before 1929. There were, mind you, twenty-seven performances of its first three movements, without the choral finale. Until the BBC took over the Proms in 1927, large-scale choral music was beyond the annual festival’s budget. And only after the Second World War did the tradition begin of playing the full Choral Symphony on the season’s penultimate night.
So it was no great heresy on Thursday (August 21) when Fabio Luisi conducted the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in the great work, three weeks before its usual Prom slot. Luisi, now in his sixties, is surely one of the great and most versatile conductors of today: I heard him many times a principal conductor of the New York Met in the years 2011 to 2017. His presence – with grey hair now turning white – is more elegant than I had remembered; it’s fun to see the rapid stride with which he paces to the Albert Hall podium, and exciting to watch the detailed fullness of his gestures. Before the interval, he made good cases for the Danish composer Bent Sørensen’s “Evening Land” (2017) and, with the Danish National Concert Choir, the British composer Anna Clyne ‘s choral cantata “The Years” (2021) – both of which were receiving their Proms premieres. The cantata could have used crisper choral diction, but the orchestra is excellent. “Evening Land” paints the quietest of rural landscapes, often becoming a concerto for the orchestra’s first violin, trembling and sliding in the air.
In the Beethoven, it sounded noble. That’s a dangerous word, but Luisi’s tempi are – like that stride to the podium – brisk. The centrally placed timpani were often electrifying, and one solo horn produced singing tone of exceptional focus and fullness. But Luisi’s best marvels lie in coördination, above all in the fascinations of the third movement, where one passage became a perfect synthesis of two detached but simultaneous ideas (strings versus brass and woodwind) while another shows one section answering another in question-and-answer across space. In the fourth movement, when the famous Joy time first appears, it’s a rumble in the low strings: with Luisi, it felt wonderfully subterranean, a warning premonition of the eruption to come.
Some listeners love to complain that the big tune is actually a boring tune: which can be true if it’s played like a plodding brass-band march. But Beethoven knows so many ways to treat it – he is an alchemist in the way he makes us hear the same material by different lights – so that the two next renditions of the tune are utterly unalike: the bass’s version is a noble (that word again) lone proclamation, but the choral account is a tsunami, “drunk with fire” as in the words being sung (“feuertrunken”).
The four vocal soloists – two black, two white, casting that suits the symphony’s broad conception of humanity – were each distinctive in the Ode to Joy: Clara Cecilie Thomsen (soprano, Danish), Jasmin White (contralto, American), Issachah Savage (tenor, American), Adam Palka (bass, Polish). It’s easy for the contralto (usually a mezzo) to be overwhelmed by the others, but no chance of that with White’s firm and dark tones. Beethoven often seems, especially here and in “Fidelio”, to be one of those composers who writes uncomfortably for the voice – the same is true of Janáček – but real artists always show the expressive point of the most strenuous passages, as did both Thomsen and Savage with the most high-lying lines: Thomsen sounds unflappably celestial, Savage sweetly heroic. Palka’s singing is more serious than joyful, but it has real bel canto fluency.
Another of Europe’s most striking conductors, the Finnish maestro Santtu-Mathias Rouvali, led the Philharmonia the previous evening, on Wednesday 20 August. Although he was using a baton, it was often better to watch his other hand: no maestro has more vivid fingers and arms, now rippling, now aiming, now releasing. He is now starting his fifth season as the Philharmonia’s principal conductor: you could feel his delight in its range of colours throughout Ravel’s 1922 kaleidoscopic arrangement of Mussorgsky’s 1874 “Pictures at an Exhibition”. If you’re used to the Mussorgsky piano original, Ravel’s version can sound shockingly ornate; even though I knew the Ravel, I was – agreeably – shocked on this occasion.
In the outer movements of Tchaikovsky’s second piano concerto, Canadian pianist Bruce Liu’s was often too dense, making the brilliant clusters of notes too airless. The second movement, however, breathed and glowed. Tchaikovsky here is at his most formally experimental, introducing solo violin and solo cello, first in a duet that recalls the famous lakeside adagio of “Swan Lake”, then in a contemplative trio with the piano. (As an encore, Liu played a Scott Joplin rag with a double bass player from the orchestra and Rouvali creating percussion. High spirits all round, with Rouvali’s rhythm especially irresistible.)
On August 13, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eva Ollikainen (Finnish) played a quadruple bill that included two of the most renowned compositions of the last century, Ravel’s “Boléro” (1928) and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (1913). The two have developed opposite reputations – the “Boléro” as an outrageous crowd-pleaser, the “Rite” an iconoclastic shocker. To hear them on the same programme showed what they have in common. Both begin with solo wind instruments playing non-European and rhythmically irregular melodies; both build to violence; both suddenly end by collapsing with sounds of destruction. Ollikainen made them both knockouts.
She also made poetic drama from the U.K. premiere of the Icelandic (British resident) composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s cello concerto “Before we fall” (a BBC co-commission), with Johannes Moser as cello
soloist. Although Thorvaldsdottir’s score is longer and more violent, it’s a cousin of the landscape painting in Sørensen’s “Evening Land” and uses the same slow string slides (portamenti), here suggesting the movement of the earth itself as well as of changes in the light.
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