Now, which ‘Nation’ would this
be, exactly? The one that, in the vast majority, does not have a clue
about classical music and regards ‘The Three Tenors’ as the acme of
elitist art? Or are we really looking at a dying vestige of the revoltingly
insulting concept of ‘Cool Britannia’ which so exactly defined this
government’s attitude to ‘Culchur?’ Search me, but one thing I do know,
and that is that if you’re going to engage in exercises like the one
whereby listeners were invited to vote for their favourites from a selection
of arias, you need to do some proper, well informed research in terms
of matching all the ‘choices’ on offer with the singers who are
actually going to perform them, and I’m afraid whichever 21 year old
was given this little task goofed up in a big way.
If you’re going to invite audiences
to vote to hear ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ or ‘Voi che sapete’ (and, of course,
they will, since most of them have never heard of stuff like ‘Where
e’er you walk’) then you need a Pavarotti and a Bartoli or their ilk,
to sing them. If you’re going to invite singers like John Mark Ainsley
and Rosemary Joshua (equally eminent in their own fields as the aforementioned)
then you need to have the grace – better still, the simple nous – to
give audiences a list of aria choices which will suit them. Of course,
this simple task apparently proved impossible, so we got the unhappy
spectacle of arguably the world’s leading Handel tenor and soprano performing
repertoire suited mainly to belters and Kiri Te Kanawa.
To have Ainsley singing ‘Una furtiva
lagrima’ is just about as appropriate as having Pavarotti performing
‘On Wenlock Edge.’ Ainsley’s is a stunning voice, and he is an unusually
gifted stage actor and a wonderful Lieder singer: but despite his honeyed
tone he is not a Donizetti tenor, and his agile phrasing and delicate
timbre suit neither this music nor this hall, unless of course they
are used in the repertoire in which he excels – which is about three-quarters
of it, and ought to be enough for anyone. I would have loved to hear
him sing ‘Where’er you walk’ as much as I would have loved to hear him
and Rosemary Joshua perform, say, ‘As Steals the Morn,’ so I’m not criticizing
the choice of singers, just the inept matching of singer to song. Nor
am I saying that singers can’t step out of their Handel boxes – I’ve
admired both in all sorts of music, but in such a ‘showcase’ arena as
the Proms, it did neither any service to be displayed as they were.
Of course, John Mark did everything he could with the aria, turning
the trills exquisitely and presenting as convincing a portrait of the
haplessly love-lorn Nemorino as anyone I’ve ever come across, but he
just does not have the beef in the tone which audiences have come to
expect in this music, and I doubt if anyone seated higher than the lower
boxes, took much notice of most of what he was singing.
I would have loved to have heard
Rosemary Joshua sing, say, ‘Myself I shall Adore’ which is, after all,
only the several-hundred-years earlier and miles better original of
‘I Feel Pretty’ – ‘If I persist in gazing, myself I shall adore!’ (Handel)
– ‘Who’s that pretty girl in that mirror there?’ (Bernstein) which latter
she did, unfortunately, sing, or rather something which seemed to contain
the words ‘Ey feale prittee, eau seau prittee, eau seau prittie ehnd
wittie ehnd brite.’ Loved the dress, though. Previously on the show,
Rosemary had given a creditable account of ‘Voi che sapete’ considering
that she is a light lyric soprano and not a mezzo, and that she simply
does not have the necessary for phrases like ‘L’alma avvampar’ – however,
she did all she could to present Cherubino’s character.
The pair also ‘duetted’ – what
a ghastly word, but it seems the right one here – in ‘Jetzt, Schätzchen,
jetzt sind wir allein’ from ‘Fidelio.’ I cannot imagine what induced
anyone to vote for this, since taken out of context there’s really very
little to it: perhaps they thought they were voting for ‘O Namenlose
Freude’ although for Joshua and Ainsley to sing that would be about
as appropriate as for them to launch into, say, ‘Heil dir, Sonne.’ Most
of the audience didn’t have a clue as to what was going on here, and
all Ainsley’s determined grimacing and Joshua’s coquettish pouting were
in vain – the piece was very nicely sung, however, by both of them –
but then it would be, considering the fact that the roles of Marzelline
and Jaquino are actually suitable for their voices.
Moving on, as they say… Ainsley
also sang four Britten folk songs, beautifully of course, especially
‘The Salley Gardens’ which he shaped with the kind of loving intimacy
with this music which is his forte (or one of them, anyway) and ‘O Waly
Waly’ which could hardly have been better performed to reveal its melancholy
sweetness: singing of English music that was neither wincingly precious
nor annoyingly hearty – precisely what I admire most about this tenor,
and a great joy to hear – but suitable for this vast hall? I don’t think
so.
Why have I not mentioned the backing
group, the BBC Concert Orchestra (careful, now, not the BBC Symphony)
led by Barry Wordsworth? Probably because backing is about all that’s
needed in this context, although to be fair there was much pleasure
to be gained from some of the delicately scaled-down playing in the
Britten. They had plenty of chances to display their prowess in the
Hungarian March from ‘La Damnation de Faust’ although the first part
was taken rather reticently, and there was some fine brass playing to
be heard here. The players also provided some delightful support in
‘Peter and the Wolf,’ narrated rather blandly by David Attenborough
– the main pleasure of this was the nicely characterized flute birdsong
and the music illustrative of nonchalant skipping at ‘Boys like him
are not afraid of wolves!’
The second half began with bits
of Walton’s ‘Façade,’ a work I can’t see the point of unless
it’s performed with its intended declamations, and it ended with Khatchaturian’s
Suite no. 2 from ‘Spartacus,’ a work I can’t see the point of at all,
although since this was ‘the nation’s favourite Prom’ it must be beloved
of some thousands (?) but not, obviously, the many who could not last
the course & had to walk out before the end. Much as I’d like to
attribute this to the sheer drivel that is the music, I’m afraid I have
to say that the cause was the heat – it must have been like a sauna
up in the gods, and I cannot understand why the new air conditioning
system was not fully operational. I’ve said before that the British
love to suffer and maybe that’s especially so at this most self-consciously
British of all our festivals, but this was going too far.
The highlight of this concert
was a sublime performance of Vaughan Williams’ glorious ‘The Lark Ascending’
by Janine Jansen: this young lady is one of those about whom one can
truly say that the Gods were in a good mood when they made her, since
she has the most wonderfully secure technique, the most sensitive and
poetic interpretative style and she’s so fabulous looking that you just
can’t take your eyes off her – hacks are always saying that Miss so-and-so
‘plays as good as she looks’ but in this case it’s true, and she also
has the impeccable taste to play a Cremona Stradivarius of 1727, and
the talent to have been awarded the right to do so. This violin’s rich
tone has much to do with the effect Jansen achieves, but the tender
delicacy with which she evokes the Lark’s flight in those astonishingly
tremulous passages which begin and end the piece are all due to her
own sure technique and sensitivity to this lovely but under-performed
music. Meredith’s poem may be a poor shadow of Shelley’s ‘original,’
but Vaughan Williams’ re-creation of the ‘silver chain of sound… ever
winging up’ is one of the most purely beautiful pieces of music written
in the 20th century, and Jansen, beautifully supported by
Barry Wordsworth’s direction of the orchestra, gave it all the intensity
it needs and deserves. This was the perfect marriage of artist and work,
unlike some of what had gone before.
Melanie Eskenazi
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