BBC Promenade Concerts  2007: A preview from London Editor Melanie Eskenazi.

 

‘The Greatest Music Festival in the World’ - ‘Well, the Proms isn’t really a proper FESTIVAL, is it…? ‘

‘It’s excellent, this year – loads of vocal music, plenty of English music…’ ‘A disgrace - hardly any Mahler, no real English music to speak of. .and as for having Michael Ball…’

And so it goes on  -  of all the Music Festivals I know, the Proms always inspires the most excitement and debate: I receive the glossy brochures from Salzburg and Schwarzenberg, Glyndebourne and Glimmerglass  with great pleasure, and set them aside for leisurely perusal, perhaps later that day – but the Proms brochure is the one I eagerly tear open and rush through, gleefully ticking off the concerts I want to hear - and then, of course, moderating that pleasure with my editor’s hat on, realizing that the most delectable ones will be fought over by at least five of my colleagues.

Of course the Proms is a ‘proper’ Festival  - those who say it’s not are usually the same people who tell you that anything on the Internet is not ‘proper’ journalism(as though there were some ‘qualification’ such as a degree in Music or perhaps English... hang on a minute, though, I believe my eight colleagues and I have about thirteen of those between us)  and who have missed the fact that of all the resources on ‘The Opera Critic,’ it is not a daily tabloid or broadsheet which is the most read, but ‘Seen & Heard’  - of course no one confuses frequency or volume with excellence, but if a review is not worth reading, then I don’t go back to that site or newspaper  - and our readers appear to come back again and again, as indeed I do to the Proms: egalitarian, sometimes an endurance test (The heat! The noisy Prommers! The noisy Critics! The daft system in the Café!) it is everything a Festival should be  -  a celebration of Music in all its diversity, held in glorious surroundings.

So, what are this year’s ‘top picks?’ This 113^th season is the 80^th anniversary of the partnership between the Proms and the BBC, so celebration is in the air with many concerts commemorating Premieres: works by Walton and Frank Bridge feature in the First Night and the first Cadogan Hall Matinee, and first-performed-here works continue with pieces by Britten, Strauss and Martinů. BBC commissioning is marked with works by Hans Werner Henze (including the UK premiere of Sebastian im Traum on August 17^th) and Arvo Pärt, and Mark Elder conducts Shostakovich’s 7^th Symphony on August 4^th, commemorating one of the most famous of the wartime Proms premieres, given just two months after the score had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union.

This is a big year for ‘Themes,’ and they are all enticing ones – ‘Shakespeare and Music’ covers 25 concerts, with works as diverse as Verdi’s Macbeth, from Glyndebourne Opera on July 24^th, and settings of the Songs by Elizabeth Maconchy (Philip Langridge at Cadogan Hall on August 13^th) and by Arne (Mark Padmore, August 18^th) -  ‘Auden and Blake’ is an equally appealing theme, including many works by Britten (the ‘Serenade’ on September 1^st, ‘Our Hunting Fathers’ on July 27^th, Chorales sung by Polyphony on July 30^th).

This year also commemorates the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Elgar and the 50^th of the death of Sibelius, with both composers finely reflected in very high-calibre concerts including Elgar’s ‘Cello Concerto on the First Night (Paul Watkins, July 13^th) the ‘Enigma’ Variations with the RPO under Daniele Gatti on August 5^th and The Apostles on August 18^th with a stellar cast: Sibelius is highlighted in a programme entirely devoted to his works on August 15^th (Osmo Vänskä), his 2^nd Symphony by the under-rated Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under one of my favourite conductors, Mariss Jansons on August 29^th, and a showing of Christopher Nupen’s wonderful pair of films about the composer, introduced by the director on August 11^th.

So, what are my own top choices? This year, Family Reunions mean that I shall be in Texas and the Caribbean for part of the Proms, so I will miss what would have been the obvious selections for anyone with my tastes -  Renée Fleming singing Berg and Korngold on August 6^th, a superb Bach programme by the Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki on the 7^th, a concert performance of Götterdämmerung with Christine Brewer and John Tomlinson on the 12^th, and Matthias Goerne’s Proms debut on the 13^th, in a selection from Das Knaben Wunderhorn. No matter  - there is a great deal else to entice me to the Royal Albert Hall this season, and my colleagues will have one less person to fight off for those delectable vocal highlights.

 

Melanie Eskenazi