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…

Nash Inventions, Wigmore Hall, 12 March 2008

Wigmore Hall

Turnage – Returning, for string sextet (London première)
Birtwistle – Pieces from Orpheus Elegies, for countertenor, oboe, and harp
MacMillan – Horn Quintet (London première)
Goehr – Clarinet Quintet (world première)
Colin Matthews – The Island, for soprano, alto flute, horn, piano, harp, viola, and cello (world première)

Nash Ensemble
Claire Booth (soprano)
Andrew Watts (countertenor)
Gareth Hulse (oboe)
Lucy Wakeford (harp)
Paul Watkins (conductor)

This concert proved a marvellous way to highlight the Nash Ensemble’s continuing commitment to new music. Five works by British composers were performed, four of which were receiving some sort of première, two of them of the world variety. Indeed, the ‘early music’ was Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s Orpheus Elegies, which dates back all the way to 2003-4. All five composers were present, along with a number of other significant figures from the ‘new music world’.

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Returning (2007), for string sextet, provided a relatively easy ‘way in’ to the music, although I doubt that many in the audience would have been unaware of what was on offer. It was evidently a genuinely felt offering for the composer’s parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, which, although it could hardly have been said to have strained at the bounds of compositional technique, utilised the sextet forces admirably and worked to a clear narrative plan. The marking ‘Almost as if frozen’ described the opening perfectly. Thereafter, the music appeared to thaw, with proliferating instrumental underneath the predominating high melodic line. Gathering in intensity – in both work and performance – the somewhat frenetic climax subsided again, although, as Anthony Burton pointed out in his programme note, less to freeze than to thaw. Much of the music sounded, in harmony and in texture, recognisably in a tradition of English string music.

There did, however, appear to be a world of difference between this sextet and the masterwork Orpheus Elegies, from which Birtwistle selected eleven of its twenty-six movements, each based upon one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Birtwistle’s original intention had been not to set the texts, but ‘simply to let them influence the instrumental music,’ with a quotation at the end of each movement, rather like the ‘titles’ to Debussy’s piano Préludes. But the texts would not leave the composer in peace, so he decided to include some of the sonnets, or at least lines from them, and to introduce a countertenor. This performance will have provided many in the audience with a curtain raiser for London’s forthcoming operatic Birtwistle events: two (!) productions of Punch and Judy and the world premiere of The Minatour. Indeed, Andrew Watts will be singing in the latter. Here one was in the presence of an utterly personal voice, with never a note wasted. The composer spoke of ‘the problem of the combination of oboe and harp: how do you avoid making that combination sound like occasional music?’ I hardly need add that there was no chance of that happening here; Birtwistle may write incidental music, such as that to the National Theatre’s Oresteia, but there is nothing remotely occasional about his compositions.

The combination of oboe and harp, with countertenor for four of the elegies, proves every bit as vigorously haunting as one would expect from this composer’s pen. The oboe, Birtwistle explained, is ‘the voice of Orpheus,’ the countertenor the narrator, and the harp represents Orpheus’s lyre, although he added the caveat, ‘very generally speaking’. Whilst there is an undeniable element of such role-playing – hardly surprising in the work of a born musical dramatist – what also struck me was how it did not seem at all fanciful to gain an overall impression of regaining the ancient music we have lost: not in any reconstructive or even restorative sense, but as a reimagination of the primæval world of the Orphic lyre. Violence and beauty are fiercely present, with the countertenor providing an appropriately unearthly timbre and also a link to the world of the Baroque aria, presenting a single emotion rather than development (think of Alexander Goehr’s The Death of Moses). Indeed, the way no.13 (Sonnet II) subsided into a silence both earthly and unearthly, following the words ‘in den Himmel, den ihr Hauch nicht trüht,’ was quite spell-binding, for which equal credit must be granted the performers. The coruscating harp glissando upon the word ‘mädchenhandig’ should have banished any suspicion that Rilke’s feminine Lament (Klage) might cloy. No.8, which ends with the words ‘Sieh, die Maschine’ was almost onomatopœic in its mechanical quality, to which both instruments contributed equally (again, nothing ‘occasional’ here!) Gareth Hulse’s oboe almost seemed to speak in the scherzo-like no.23 (‘Ordne die Schreir, singender Gott!’): this could have been a refraction of the memory and afterlife of Orpheus himself. The concision of no.24 put me in mind of Webern: everything that needed to be said was said and then it stopped. And the memory of the only occasionally – in a very different sense – but most movingly relieved monotone of the vocal line of the second half of no.20 (Sonnet V) will remain with me for a long time. To be ‘hearers and a mouth for nature,’ in that sonnet’s words, was what Birtwistle truly accomplished in inimitable fashion.

James MacMillan’s Quintet for horn and string quartet (2007) provided quite a contrast. This was an exciting, extrovert work, which relished the hunting resonances of the horn, of which the splendid Richard Watkins took full advantage. The turbulently striking opening grabbed one’s attention from the outset, as towards did the singing of the richly full-toned viola line of the equally splendid Lawrence Power. A theatrical effect was attained by having the horn player leave the ensemble whilst the quartet continued to play, to be answered from offstage by a haunting horn call, almost reminiscent of Mahlerian Nachtmusik.

The second half brought us the concert’s two world premières. With Alexander Goehr’s quintet for clarinet and string quartet (2007) we returned to the ‘Manchester School’, although it is not clear that the music of Goehr and Birtwistle ever had much in common. If Stravinsky acted as godfather to much of the latter’s music, it is Schoenberg who has exerted so much of an influence over the former, not least via Walter Goehr, himself a Schoenberg pupil. (It is characteristic of a composer who has been so generous with his time and experience to younger composers and to other musicians that, when I spoke to him before the concert, he was far more concerned to enquire after my current research on Schoenberg than to talk about himself and his works.) And beyond Schoenberg, of course, lies Brahms. Brahms is liable to come to mind in any clarinet quintet, but I did wonder whether this single-movement work in twelve sections was in some sense a homage to that most richly autumnal of composers. There was certainly an almost Brahmsian beauty to the string writing, married to an equally characteristic post-Brahms/Schoenberg integrity of motivic working out. This was the case both for work and performance, in which, astonishingly, every line was made to tell as if the Nash Ensemble were presenting an established masterpiece. (I firmly believe from this first hearing that the work will prove to be just that.) The tenth section, an almost Bachian sarabande, provided a still centre to the work’s progression. Once again, the synthesis between counterpoint and Classical form evoked Brahms, or rather an historically mediated memory of his tradition’s concerns. Interestingly – and somewhat enigmatically – the composer himself referred to the inspiration of masses by Josquin and Ockeghem, which, he wrote, ‘probably accounts’ for the quintet’s ‘rather austere and motet-like character’. This, I must admit, was not at all how I heard the music, which I found warm, classically dramatic, and not at all austere.

The final work was Colin Matthews’s The Island (2007), also based upon Rilke, in this case his Neue Gedichte. The three poems of Rilke’s North Sea ‘Insel’, in Stephen Cohn’s excellent translation, are set as a continuous span with instrumental interludes. The vocal line, here treated to a commanding and apparently perfectly judged rendition by Claire Booth, is frankly melodic. At first, it soared above the instrumental ensemble, whose role was definitely to accompany, albeit with a beautiful array of colours and harmonic shifts. Occasional echoing of the vocal line, for instance by the richly expressive alto flute and sweet-toned violin, gradually blossomed into a greater independence for the ensemble, fully exploited during the two evocative interludes. The dark piano chords at the close of the second poem, ‘Upon the outer dyke a sheep appears/larger than life and almost ominous’, were themselves as ominous as the tolling of funeral bells. By the time we reached the third poem, there was a sense both of maintaining the impetus of instrumental development and of completing the cycle by returning or, perhaps better, renewing the opening mood. We had moved on from a tide that ‘wipes out the path across the flats’, to encompass, without forgetting, something ‘outside the course of galaxies, of other stars or suns’. As in every work this programme comprised, the Nash Ensemble and friends did the composers prouder than one might have thought possible.