Sunday, August 25, 2024

THE PROMS

LONDON IS SUCH AN EXCITING CITY THAT I COULD WRITE pages about our first impressions this time around, walking around Oxford Circus and Regent Street, buying a cap at my old shop near the great Zedel’s restaurant, going up the escalator at Booth’s at Piccadilly, riding the Tube or having the greatest Fritto Misto ever at Caffè Concerto. But what I really want to write about is that over the course of three evenings Sabâ and I went to The Proms.

The BBC Proms, founded in 1895, is an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts and other events held annually in the Royal Albert Hall. Since 1927 the BBC has organized and broadcast the events. Each season consists of concerts in the Hall and additional Proms events across the UK. The season is a significant highlight in British culture and in classical music and has been hailed as the world's largest and most democratic musical festival. We went to three concerts.

Getting the tickets is quite an adventure. The program appears in the middle of April but the tickets do not go on sale until the end of June. I stayed up all night first waiting for the on line box office to open, then getting in with a lottery, then paying for all the concerts we had selected a couple of hours later. Since all is in British Time and the box Office opens at nine am but the on-line at seven, you have to wait until you are done and then you have to wait until you get the tickets to know your exact locations. Great excitement and great fun.

THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL WAS BUILT BY QUEEN VICTORIA in honor of her beloved husband Prince Albert, It is a circular building with a great dome, a protruding stage, standing room in the place where Orchestra seats normally are and individual seats all around as well as levels of loggias and balconies. The setting is quite spectacular and mind blowing. The sound is good. The loggia seats a bit uncomfortable because of the tight spaces but, the concerts,,,Oh! The concerts!!!

We arrived early the first day, went through a slight bag check, got our program and walked up to our loggia where there were eight seats. We were in the second row on the left. A tray with delicious canapés as well as a bottle of cold white wine was waiting for us with our name card.

The orchestra was the Ensemble Resonanz with Riccardo Minasi conducting. The program was all Mozart, with the overture of The Marriage of Figaro well, opening the program. The first impression was one of silence, which was absolute. And it needed to be because the orchestra for Mozart is generally small and not very loud. We discovered Minasi as a fantastic director, incredibly knowledgeable about the composer. He conducted the whole program from memory and was enthusiastic and in control. Mozart is always a delight. It is hard not to keep reminding yourself that he started composing when he was five years old and wrote over 800 pieces in all genres. His style is classical although he later reverted to some Baroque. While all of this was going through my head I was also very impressed by Minasi, who at 46 and has already achieved a remarkable international prestige. Click here >()

He also engages beautifully with the audience. During the Sinfonia in E, the audience applauded at the end of the first movement. He very graciously turned around and, via mimic, gently and amusingly scolded the audience for applauding and warned it not to do so during the next movements, finally encouraging the applause at the end of the symphony, to the delight of the public. After the intermission, where we enjoyed our appetizers and wine, the program continued with the overture to Don Giovanni and concluded with the so called Jupiter symphony which ended deliriously with the audience enthusiastically calling the conductor to the stage three times and the whole orchestra joining in the explosion of happiness, finishing the program with the complete orchestra turning around and bowing to the statue of Prince Albert, high behind the stage at the center of the first tier. Two young violin and viola musicians were rather astonishing as well. What a night we spent with our old friend Wolfgang!

WE TOOK A BREAK FROM CLASSICAL MUSIC and went to see the comedy Fawlty Towers - a very successful running play written for television by the creator of Monty Python - that has delighted Sabâ for several decades. In the wonderful style of British humor, and spot on acting, we spent a delightful evening looking and listening to all the antics of a sitcom, just like a TV program, except live, with a very responsive audience. Theater performances are such a joy when well done. And many years later the humor is still relevant because it addresses human foibles with such elegance and verve.

The next night was “On to the Proms” again, this time for an eclectic program of Ravel, sort of twice, Holmès, whom we didn’t know, Mussorgsky and some Mozart (again!).

It’s hard to imagine a famous impressionist composer like Ravel, whom we all know for the Boléro, sitting down and telling children’s stories to young people. But that is exactly what he loved to do, which led him to write the suite of Mother Goose, incredibly lyrical and entertaining. Just like Mozart’s Piano Concerto 27. Then it was the turn of Holmès’ La Nuit et l’Amour, which sounded more like the waltzes my grandmother Mama Pepita used to play on the piano. It turns out that Holmès was born of Irish parents in Versailles and lived in France all her life, finally deciding to put an accent grave in her last name so that the French would at last pronounce it more or less right!

THEN CAME MUSSORGSKY’S PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION, written originally for piano but so rich that it lends itself to orchestrations attempted by many. Ravel’s is the most famous and better known. The work is made up of 10 musical descriptions of 10 works in the collection of a friend of Mussorgksy who passed away, with the composer creating this suite to memorialize him. In our particular performance, by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, directed by young Kazuki Yamada, it was earth shaking. The last “picture” The Bogatyr Gates started with a very soft sound of bells, far away. (They were, in fact, at the top edge of Albert Hall, stage right). Then, as the movement progressed, the orchestra started becoming forte, with the bells competing, on and on and on, reaching a crescendo until it became a free for all fortissimo with the bells competing with the orchestra and finally the whole works melding into an explosion of fabulous sound with the conductor unable to hold his enthusiasm any longer, turning toward the audience, moving his hands in an embrace of the public and clapping intensely as he concluded the incredibly sonorous grand finale with the orchestra and the bells going full blast and the audience erupting in applause and cheers and hoots and hollers.

I don’t know how to say Mein Gott! in Russian but this was, at least, a triple Mein Gott! moment. The applause went on forever, the orchestra applauded the audience, the audience applauded the conductor, we all applauded everybody and each other. It was a total and absolute mayhem of a performance.

(We even forgot how great the layered smoked salmon canapés were)

We left the Hall full of energy and wonder at the marvel of the power of music to transform lives. AND could not wait for the next performance…

IT DID NOT TAKE LONG TO WAIT FOR A DAY before we were again in our loggia at the Royal Albert Hall, this time for a rather Romantic program that started with D’un soir triste by Lili Boulanger, a well-known pianist and composer of the last part of the 19th century. She was the younger sister of Nadia Boulanger, who became the teacher of many famous artists, including Daniel Barenboim, Aaron Copland of Fanfare for a Common Man and Billy The Kid, Phillip Glass (whom we met in Árbol de Luz with Claudia and Roberto), Quincy Jones (who was at most TED conferences), Dinu Lipatti, Astor Piazzolla (great composer of Tangos). Nadia was also a conductor of orchestras. The piece by her sister Lili Boulanger is melancholic and, fortunately, brief. Then came Debussy’s La Mer, a truly impressionistic piece of art that is a bit reminiscing, in its structure, not its melodies, of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. You are able to discerns the various stages of the sea, and the music becomes a powerful creator of visual images of the immense variety of moods the sea can take.

The whole concert was directed by a young, very talented musician, Lahav Shani. We found out later that he is the Head Conductor of the orchestra he directed at this Prom, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. When intermission came we enjoyed a wonderful array of desserts with a fabulous Pouilly Fuissé cold bottle that we later took to our BandB, but not before we were treated to the astonishing delight of the second part of the concert.

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.3 was played by Lahav who, like his mentor Daniel Borenboim also plays and conducts the orchestra from the piano. At first I thought that this was a little bit of grandstanding, à la Mozart, who used to do it because he was, well, Mozart. I was thinking that if there is no conductor directing the orchestra when the pianist is playing, then the orchestra does not need a conductor. It’s a familiar enough practice of course, in Mozart and Beethoven, though some might consider it foolhardy applied to Prokofiev, whose piano writing is nothing if not exactingly athletic, and who also demands orchestral playing and conducting of almost clockwork precision. Lahav (we are on first name basis) proved, however, to be a tour de force that bordered on staggering. The devil-may-care brilliance and impertinent charm of Shani’s pianism suit Prokofiev down to the ground.

We couldn’t help but be struck by the disarming dexterity of his way with those driven, helter-skelter allegros. He made sweeping arm gestures in passages when the piano is silent and controlled tempo and expression in the orchestra, but most of the time we were acutely aware of the orchestra’s intense focus on watching and listening to each other as well as to him. The whole thing was real edge-of-your-seat stuff as ensemble and balance risked coming apart at any moment but stuck together like Crazy Glue. The end result was thrilling beyond belief.

The last chords of the concerto were magnificent and the audience responded vigorously in kind. As did the orchestra, the strings tapping their bows and the other musicians clapping with one hand, all against their legs.

But this was not over yet.

THE STAFF TOOK AWAY THE GRAND PIANO and brought back the conductor’s stand. Lahav stepped up, again without a score, and proceeded to take us through Ravel’s La Valse, except this time it was like we had never heard it before. It reminded Sabâ of many other pieces she has heard over the years, particularly as film scores. The piece brought the concert to a close with its dark yet alluring intimations of decline and eventual destruction. The string tone sounded at times so sensual as to be decadent. Woodwind and brass alternately seduced and glared. And the ending, oh my goodness, the ending brought rhythm and music itself so closely together that it finally seem to implode. It was terrifyingly overwhelming and left us drained, exhausted, yet energized and in awe of such creativity. WE WILL COME BACK TO THE PROMS!