THE PROMS
Royal Albert Hall

Anniversary celebration forms a large part of this year’s Promenade Concerts. Elliott Carter, still composing buoyantly, will be 100 in December. Pierre-Laurent Aimard has given captivating performances of his new Caténaires for piano (at the opening concert) and of Night Fantasies (1980); Nicholas Daniel was a lyrical, virtuoso soloist in the 1987 Oboe Concerto; and still to come is the British premiere of Soundings, composed in 2005 for the Chicago Symphony with Daniel Barenboim as both conductor and pianist. Olivier Messiaen, who died in 1992 and would have been 100 this year, is being handsomely commemorated with performances of seventeen works. Thea Musgrave’s eightieth birthday, Michael Berkeley’s and Nigel Osborne’s sixtieth, Simon Holt’s and Magnus Linberg’s fiftieth are being marked. So is the fiftieth anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death, with five symphonies and ten other works. Fifty years ago, all Rachmaninov’s music for piano and orchestra was heard at the Proms, and this year’s programmes comprise a Rachmaninov Festival: the four concertos, the Paganini Rhapsody, two symphonies, the Symphonic Dances and the All-Night Vigil Vespers. All this commemoration comes at a cost. There is little Mozart and less Haydn; of Schubert just four songs (orchestrated) and of Schumann just the piano Gesänge der Frühe; no Britten, Tippett, or Walton; no Birtwistle or Maxwell Davies. Works that were once Prom staples – César Franck’s Symphony and Symphonic Variations, the Schumann and Grieg piano concertos – have disappeared. Yet the programmes are as rich and varied as ever.

Four of Messiaen’s former pupils are represented: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and, both as composers and conductors, Pierre Boulez and George Benjamin. In one of the interval talks, Boulez, Benjamin and Tristan Murail, three very different composers, spoke eloquently about their inspiring teacher. “Stockhausen Day” was a pair of concerts. Two performances of the three-orchestra Gruppen (1958), the BBC Symphony conducted by David Robertson, Martyn Brabbins and Pascal Rophé, enclosed two episodes of Klang, the twenty-four-hours work left uncompleted at the composer’s death, at seventy-nine, last year. Cosmic Pulses, the Thirteenth Hour, is in fact a long half-hour of electronic sounds moving through the hall: “I think directions of sound in space and speed of sound in space”, the composer wrote, “are as important as pitch, duration, loudness, or timbre”. Twenty-four “loops” of material at different pitches and paces rotate from eight loudspeakers through 241 “trajectories in space”. There was a bourdon of deep rumble; a shimmer of high-pitched twittering; what sounded like a babel of low and middle voices from which, towards the end, bursts of crazy laughter, scraps of nursery rhyme, even fragments of melody seemed to emerge. Harmonien, a fifteen-minute trumpet solo episode from the Fifth Hour (a BBC commission receiving its first performance), was less ambitious and easier to grasp: a series of twenty-four melodies with variations, given a dazzling performance by Marco Blaauw. A vivid performance of Kontakte (1960), Nicholas Hodges the pianist and Colin Currie the percussionist, completed the programme.

The second concert was a new realization of Stimmung by Paul Hillier and his crack Theatre of Voices: seventy minutes of a single chord built from voiced overtones of a low B flat. Hillier’s “Copenhagen version” was more overtly dramatic, more immediately “verbal”, more varied in timbres and emotional colours than either the 1968 original by the Cologne Collegium Vocale or Gregory Rose’s Singcircle performance of 1977. (In the programme book, the erotic texts were left untranslated – “to spare our blushes”, said the BBC announcer.) Over the years, the Proms have done well by Stockhausen. This was the third Prom presentation of Gruppen, the fourth of Kontakte, the second of Stimmung. His pretensions were considerable: “What I have achieved in the last half-century is more than has been achieved in the last 700 years of musical history”. He composed the seven-day opera, Licht. He declared that he came from another planet. “For thirty years I’ve not been able to have a meaningful conversation with Karlheinz”, said Boulez. Easy for common sense to sniff. Easier still, I’ve found over the years, to be enthralled by music so rigorously controlled yet so abundantly imaginative.

George Benjamin conducted the BBC Symphony in his Ringed by the Flat Horizon. In 1980, it brought a nineteen-year-old Cambridge undergraduate to prominence when, after its university premiere, it was taken up by the Proms. It is now a “contemporary classic”. The title is from The Waste Land: “What is that sound high in the air . . . Ringed by the flat horizon only . . . Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air”. After his study with Messiaen, Benjamin was working with Alexander Goehr. The twenty-minute tone poem unites mastery of timbres and harmonies with precision of form. He is profuse with ideas but not profligate in his use of them. Thomas Adès conducted the Birmingham Symphony in his exciting and beautiful Tevot (2006), which, Paul Griffiths suggested in his programme note, might be the love child of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Two birthday commissions, from Simon Holt (fifty this year) and Kenneth Hesketh (forty), proved worth hearing, if less remarkable. Holt’s Troubled Light and Hesketh’s Graven Image were both colourful.

Howard Ferguson, who died in 1999, is another composer who would have been 100 this year. He was commemorated, not worthily, by his Overture for an Occasion, a piece that in a letter to Gerald Finzi he described as “not out of the top drawer”. The “Irish” concert – the Ulster Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Montgomery, like Ferguson Belfast-born – continued with Stanford’s Second Piano Concerto (1911), fluently and lyrically played (and choreographed with many an extravagant, graceful gesture) by Finghin Collins. It is the versatile, prolific Stanford’s tribute to Rachmaninov, whose Second Piano Concerto he had conducted at the Royal College and then, with the composer as soloist, at the Leeds Festival in 1910. The tunes may be less memorable than those of The Revenge or the B-flat Te Deum, but every Stanford revival – most of all, the rare revivals of his opera The Travelling Companion – brings its reward. Among other British revivals, George Butterworth’s orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad (1912), despite eloquent advocacy from Mark Elder and the Hallé, seems to have faded; and Ethel Smyth’s Concerto for Horn and Violin, dedicated to Henry Wood, was an undistinguished bore. An ill-balanced performance may have been partly to blame: Tasmin Little’s violin disappeared whenever Richard Watkin’s noble horn joined with it. Before the concerto, Wood’s orchestration of Bach’s D-minor Toccata and Fugue, usually so stirring, had also been ill-balanced; the brasses of the BBC Scottish Symphony, conducted by Stefan Smolyon, swamped the strings.

Andrew Porter is chief music critic of the TLS.

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