First Night of the Proms – Hyde/BBC SO/Stasevska: Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, MacMillan, and Sibelius, 30 July 2021

Royal Albert Hall

Vaughan Williams: Serenade to Music
Poulenc: Organ Concerto in G minor
James MacMillan: When Soft Voices Die (world premiere)
Sibelius: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.43


Elizabeth Llewellyn (soprano)

Jess Dandy (contralto)

Allan Clayton (tenor)

Michael Mofidian (bass-baritone)

BBC Singers (chorus-master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Dalia Stasevska (conductor)

Cards on the table. Poulenc aside, I have not previously been a great fan of the music of any of the composers featured in this year’s First Night of the Proms. It does one good, though, to test one’s preferences and prejudices; in any case, this was a moment of return for which I wanted, even needed, to be present, almost irrespective of repertoire. Last year saw a few Proms at the end of the season, albeit with no audience. I was not in London for the summer of 2019, so it was not far off three years since I had lest ventured to the Royal Albert Hall. This was a lovely concert for which to return.


And what piece could be more apt as an opener than Vaughan Williams’s Shakespearean hymn to music? (Whatever my ambivalence toward some of Vaughan Williams’s output, I have loved this piece since first hearing it as a schoolboy.) Its London pedigree—premiered here in 1938 by Sir Henry Wood, for whose diamond jubilee as a conductor it was composed—made the Serenade to Music all the more apt. This was a performance imbued with delight from its opening chords, Vaughan Williams’s orchestration and later vocal writing resounding perfectly through the hall’s challenging acoustic. Dalia Stasevska’s direction, untroubled by drab English tradition, drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra sonorities and languor it was difficult not to think of as in the line of Ravel, with whom the composer had studied three decades earlier. Stasevska’s shaping of contours and climaxes was spot on, permitting words and above all music to speak and sing for themselves. Especially memorable (for me) were duetting arabesques between Elizabeth Llewellyn and leader Igor Yuzefovich; the deep summons of ‘affections dark as Erebus’ by Michael Mofidian; Jess Dandy’s contralto call, ‘Music! Hark!’; and the final choral echo of Llewellyn’s ‘sweet harmony’, bathed in sweet orchestral warmth. There were no weak links, though, in a magical performance.


Also written in 1938 was Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, here given an excellent performance by Daniel Hyde, the BBC SO and Stasevska. The splendour of its opening is quite different in nature, of course, yet offered another fine Albert Hall moment. Registration was always well chosen for score and instrument alike. Hyde rightly played his part straight, as did strings whose imploring sweetness seemed to prefigure Poulenc’s later sacred music and even the Dialogues des Carmélites. Wagnerian harmonies were soon put to decidedly anti-Wagnerian use, posing questions rather than answers, Poulenc’s mock-Bachian gestures relishing the fairground of barely suppressed desire. For there was serious questing at the heart of this performance, whatever the masks Poulenc cunningly employed, wit and poignancy two sides of the same coin.


Co-commissioned by the BBC and Help Musicians, When Soft Voices Die, ames MacMillan’s setting of two poems by Shelley, emerged as a workable companion piece for the Vaughan Williams Serenade, using as it does four soloists and orchestra (no chorus). Performances were as committed and variegated as elsewhere, Llewellyn recalling the virtues of her Puccini roles. As for the piece itself, there was craftsmanship in MacMillan’s setting and no denying his taste in verse. Nevertheless, conservatism aside—Vaughan Williams and Poulenc seemed almost avant-garde by comparison—the overall sense was of anonymous proficiency.

Finally Sibelius, with whose symphonies I have long struggled. I shall not bore you with that now, other than to say this was the first performance both to convince and move me. Perhaps it was simply the right time for this music to come knocking on the door, but surely it was more than that: testament to another fine performance, flexible yet directed. by the BBC SO and Stasevska. It was striking that, even to a long-term sceptic, the opening of the first movement seemed to speak as if an old friend. Balletic lightness of touch recalled Tchaikovsky and, beyond him, perhaps more surprisingly, the orchestral writing of Mendelssohn. Not that that precluded the ardent and majestic where required, quite the contrary. Soon I could only wonder what my problem with this music had been. Pizzicato cellos and double basses in the second movement both picked up from the first and contrasted with it. Mendelssohn again came to mind as a processional forerunner, this time the Italian Symphony, though of course the music developed very much in its own, again not un-Tchaikovskian way. At any rate, rhetoric in performance seemed designed to be understood in terms of such inheritance. I am not sure I quite appreciated the movement’s lengths, but that is doubtless my problem; after all, some others still feel that way about Schubert. A third movement full of nervous energy, woodwind in its trio a necessary contrast in many ways, prepared the way for a finale that combined strong senses both of expectation and culmination. We were nearly there, that is, but there was some way yet to go. Stasevska imparted a wondrous sense of inevitability and ultimately triumph to this final leg of the journey. I may not quite be a Sibelius (or Vaughan Williams) convert yet, but greater curiosity has certainly been piqued. Just please do not ask me to sit through The Lark Ascending…

Prom 25: London Sinfonietta/Atherton - Bach and Stravinsky, 4 August 2010

Royal Albert Hall

Bach – Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248 – Chorale: ‘Ach mein herzliebes Jesulein’ (on organ)
Bach – Canonic Variations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her,’ BWV 769
Bach-Stravinsky – Chorale Varations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch’, BWV 769
Stravinsky – Threni

Elizabeth Atherton (soprano)
Hilary Summers (mezzo-soprano)
Alan Oke (tenor)
Andrew Kennedy (tenor)
David Wilson-Johnson (baritone)
Sir John Tomlinson (bass)
Daniel Hyde (organ)
BBC Singers (chorus master: Paul Brough)
London Sinfonietta
David Atherton (conductor)

On paper, this looked like one of the most intelligently planned Proms in this year’s series. How would it turn out in practice? Just as well, a heartening reminder of how difficult and yet crucial good programming can be. Not only, astonishingly, was this the Proms premiere of Threni; the Bach-Stravinsky connection was explored in just the way conductors were able to do before period fundamentalists declared Bach off bounds for modern musicians – and, tragically, won. The counter-attack would have been aided by some ‘straight’, unhyphenated Bach being performed by the orchestra too, not just on the organ, but there is something about gift-horses and their mouths…

Daniel Hyde opened with Bach’s harmonisation of the Vom himmel hoch chorale for Christmas Day, albeit transposed down a tone, so as to fit with the Variations to follow. The organist gave a decent account of these extraordinary pieces of canonic wizardry, though he proved a little hidebound – forgive the pun – by more than a hint of the metronome, a few slowings down seeming arbitrary or necessitated by contrapuntal complexity rather than musical strategy. Registrations were relatively ‘Baroque’ by the standards of the Royal Albert Hall instrument, which of course is not very ‘Baroque’ at all, the reeds being something of an acquired taste, but Hyde steered clear of probing the labyrinthine, Bergian complexities of the music: brightness and order were very much to the fore. And yet, though this certainly is not my Bach, I began to realise that this was actually rather close to Stravinsky’s, which was probably more the point in this programme. The ‘sewing-machine’ approach of post-war organists, harpischordists, and chamber orchestras was very much the soil from which Stravinsky’s anti-Romantic Bach emerged. (Interested readers may care to look at Richard Taruskin’s work in Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford, 1995), and my own critique of Taruskin: ‘Romantic Modernism: Bach, Furtwängler, and Adorno,’ in New German Critique, 104 (Spring/Summer 2008), pp. 71-102.)

Stravinsky’s equally extraordinary recomposition followed: all of Bach’s counterpoint, further embellished. How rich, and yet how deliciously typical, or typically delicious, for someone who fulminated against others for creating Bach in their own image! (A favourite instance of mine is this: ‘The Saint Matthew’s Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach is written for a chamber-music ensemble. Its first performance in Bach’s lifetime was perfectly realized by a total force of thirty-four musicians, including soloists and chorus. That is known. And nevertheless in our day one does not hesitate to present the work, in complete disregard of the composer’s wishes, with hundreds of performers, sometimes almost a thousand. This lack of understanding of the interpreter’s obligations, this arrogant pride in numbers, this concupiscence of the many, betray a complete lack of musical education.’ The barefaced cheek of coupling an attack upon ‘this arrogant pride in numbers,’ whilst lauding a precise number of thirty-four musicians…) The London Sinfonietta under David Atherton played as Stravinskians to the manner born. At first I thought the BBC Singers a little underpowered, but soon realised that it would have been quite distorting – and not in a positive, Stravinskian sense – to punch out the chorale as if with an organ trumpet stop: the point here is the counterpoint, as it were, since we knew the chorale itself inside out by now. But there is simpler rejoicing to be had too: it is Christmas after all, as the opening brass reminded us, inescapably suggesting Renaissance polyphony. What struck me throughout was how utterly Stravinsky recreates Bach in his own image. The first variation teemed with life, Agon-like, Helen Tunstall’s harp in particular; the third sounded like a sequel to the Symphony in Three Movements. Michael Cox’s excellent flute solos should be given mention here. And the astonishing – even by Bach’s, Stravinsky’s, and Bach-Stravinsky’s standards – final variation wore its fast tempo lightly, quite justified by a performance in which one could hear every last contrapuntal artifice.

The neglect of Threni is incomprehensible to me, but then so is that of Webern. I am delighted to report that this fine performance will surely have made a host of converts. Stravinsky’s Lamentations thrived, as so often, counter-intuitively, do smaller-scale works, in the Royal Albert Hall. One has to listen and one does – and one is not expecting weight of sound. Such was clear from the canons in the Complaint of De elegia tertia. The opening Incipit made an instant sonorous connection with the Bach Variations, one maintained and furthered throughout the performance. Indeed, I was throughout struck by the vividness of Stravinsky’s sparing instrumentation – and its proximity to late Webern. The keenness of syncopation in the second part of De elegia tertia could have been nothing other than an utterly Stravinskian take upon the Austrian composer. Duets, for instance those of the two tenors in De elegia prima, were rich in musical reference: Webern certainly, but the Renaissance and Monteverdi too, all the way back to the synagogue. Soloists who made an especial impression were the rich-toned Hilary Summers, whom I recently admired in Le marteau sans maître, and the inimitable John Tomlinson. Somehow, as ever, he made this music his own, even with a wide vibrato one might have thought antithetical to Stravinskian intervallic precision. It did not matter; indeed, it humanised, and his diction was superb. Stravinsky’s authentic voice shone through his intellectual challenges: the originality of this work is something special even by his own standards. And the response to Jeremiah’s text is simply perfect, a setting that takes us all the way back to Hebrew roots, and yet down so many avenues thereafter, fused in an almost frighteningly coherent whole. The final De elegia quinta, in work and performance, invoked and indeed reconciled with the magical conclusion to the Symphony of Psalms. Simple, yet complex; distanced, yet close.