Pleasure at the Proms

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  Robin Holloway

  Pleasure at the Proms

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

The concert had begun with Fauré’s exquisite music for Shylock, another lost play (albeit based on The Merchant of Venice), where the gentle master’s tender eroticism glows at its brightest and clearest. Since Fauré and Bizet were separated by Berlioz’s Nuits d’été sung by Anne Sofie von Otter this was an event to treasure.

And it was good to find the great Philip Langridge singing so strongly still (13 August): bittersweet vehemence in Schumann’s Heine-Liederkreis, moving, deftly characterising Britten/Hardy Winter Words, impassioned advocate for Elizabeth Maconchy. A few days later (17 August) the BBCSO under Oliver Knussen KO’d me in two revolutionary explosions from the heady years of early modernism: The Rite of Spring reversing the gradual evolution of this primitivistic masterpiece into a gleaming showpiece, the Schoenberg Five Orchestral Pieces revealing the close coexistence within these fantastical sounds of elegance, wit, nostalgia, and violence, pain, shock.

From shallow ocean to mighty river taken at the flood. I was at the Albert Hall live for Götterdämmerung on 12 August, with a good cast under the direction of Donald Runnicles. This was a magnificent occasion; without, after a slightly shaky start, a slack or perfunctory moment, overwhelming in unremitting projection of the most colossal drama ever written. Prologue and Act 1 in particular were as well paced as I’ve ever heard; the packed auditorium hung on every word in the Waltraute/Brünnhilde exchange and the heroine’s frightening betrayal coming so fast after her declaration of enduring fidelity in love.

I have to admit, giving my ALL to this two-hour span, that concentration didn’t hold out at full tilt for the rest of the evening. How do Wagner performers (and audiences) keep it up? Despite the sight of massed voices the sound of the Vassals in Act II proved a bit sotto voce — their top B-flats should raise Capt. Fowkes’s dome (but the clashing steerhorn were fabulous). Then, in Act III, foolishly closing my eyes the better to imagine the forest clearing, the Rhine and its swimming nymphs, the hunting party, the murder of Siegfried, the moonlit procession bearing his corpse, the cleansing consummatory catastrophe by fire and flood, I drifted off into the land of dreams, missing the flash of white horse and other scenic effects projected upon the Mighty Organ. Not a note of the music, though.