On July 14, I stopped by the Royal Albert Hall to catch the first night of the BBC Proms. Whereas in the States the classical music world tends to shutter or decamp for rural pastures come summertime, the Brits shift things into high gear with this eight-week-long festival in London.
The Proms are a patriotic and sometimes political affair (the last night famously ends with a rousing group-sing of national hymns). This opening night, however, was dedicated to Finnish and Ukrainian pride. Conducting the BBC Symphony and Chorus was Dalia Stasevska, born in Ukraine and raised in Finland. Thus we had Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia to start with, his tone poem of 1899 and probably the most famous hymn to that country. (Stasevska is in fact married to Sibelius’s great-grandson.)
A call for “three cheers for the BBC Singers!” met with roars of acclamation from the audience as that heritage ensemble, whose budget was recently saved from the BBC’s chopping block, took the stage. This was the rarely heard version of Finlandia that includes lyrics for choir, added in 1940 around the time of Finland’s wars with the Soviet Union.
Stasevska’s tempo felt a tad rushed, and an aggressive timpani distracted during the opening. With the first recapitulation of the opening theme, however, things fell into place, and where the dynamics had been too harsh in the early going, brass and strings mellowed into a cohesive whole by the time the choir entered for the closing hymn passage.
The Ukrainian composer Bohdana Frolyak composed a piece that received its premiere here, Let There Be Light, inspired by the war in Ukraine. Frolyak’s tone poem shimmered into being with woodwind and strings, awash in dissonant, piercing harmonies, then alternating with lusher, more chromatic sections accompanied by harp. Its densely woven texture called to mind the erotic charge of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912) and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (1913). Its rather sylvan, moonlit flavor gave way to a febrile climax, and then pianissimo strings, chimes, and wind noises gradually faded away to silence. At first blush I was skeptical—was that long, withdrawing roar at the end justified by what preceded it? Yet listening back to Let There Be Light, it has grown on me, and it is at the very least a successful invocation or revival of fin-de-siècle music.
Following this the stagehands hauled out the grand piano and opened its lid. It’s Proms tradition, my box-mate explained, for the “Prommers”—dedicated music fans who queue for hours for a standing-room-only place—to give a hearty chant of “heave” and “ho” while this goes on (the groundlings shout the former, the nosebleeds the latter). With everything in its place, the concertmaster approached the piano to sound a tuning note, which, also per tradition, received an ironic round of applause from the Prommers.
The Briton Paul Lewis was our soloist in the Grieg Piano Concerto, that late Romantic masterpiece that Liszt once called an “intoxicating liquor.” This outpouring of youthful sentiment was honed and tweaked by Grieg over the course of decades to become the piece we know now, the fountainhead of Rachmaninoff’s concerti and a strong precursor, at moments, of French impressionism.
There are so many fantastic recordings of this concerto; being old-fashioned, my favorite is Dinu Lipatti’s powerhouse reading of 1947, perhaps the landmark recording, which the virtuoso managed to turn out in London, buoyed by steroids while dreadfully ill with cancer. The soul of a tragic hero comes through so effectively in his version of the Adagio. Lewis’s reading was precise and gracefully structured, though it lacked the fiery passion that some performers can bring to it. The orchestra was particularly fine throughout, sympathetic to its soloist, and devoid of the dynamic issues it had in Finlandia.
Following an intermission, the British actress Lesley Manville took the stage to narrate Sibelius’s rarely heard Snöfrid, a tone poem of sorts for choir and orchestra that Sibelius dubbed an “improvisation,” though nothing is ad-libbed. Sturm und Drang announced the entrance of the choir, whose singing was interceded by Manville’s spoken section. The text is based on a poem by the Swede Viktor Rydberg inspired by Norse balladry; the choir sang it in the original Swedish, while Manville recited her part in English translation. It must be stirring stuff for some, but hearing Manville’s rather on-the-nose Shakespearean delivery of lines like “draw your sword against the ogre” and “choose me, you choose the tempest,” I could not shake the association of Hollywood melodrama, shattering whatever emotional subtleties could have been established in the score. This paean to the warrior death-cult seemed somewhat discordant with the broadly agreeable sentiment of Frolyak’s Let There Be Light.
Before we could hear Benjamin Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, shouts and boos of disapproval broke out in the hall as a number of oil protesters rushed the stage with placards. Within seconds the interlopers were gingerly escorted off the stage by security, and the concert resumed without much of a hitch.
Britten’s delightfully didactic showpiece comes to us as variations and a fugue on an old tune by Henry Purcell—you can listen to the original here if you are curious. Though it is a foolproof crowd pleaser, the piece nonetheless presents challenges as it exposes each instrument of the orchestra to a solo passage.
The tutti passages were unsurprisingly brilliant and helped the evening finish on a high note. Alas, the Albert Hall’s acoustics left something to be desired for this reviewer (volume levels overall were low, and solo parts hard to pick out—a bad problem to have in the Britten), though its sumptuous appointments and the buzzing atmosphere of the Proms made up for this deficiency in spades. My recommendation to concertgoers wanting the full experience, aural and otherwise, would be to join the Prommers in the trenches and crowd towards the stage.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly listed the soloist in Grieg’s Piano Concerto as Stephen Hough.