Music In spite of mounting qualms earlier in the year, it has been a good summer for classical music festivals. A couple of weeks ago the Salzburg Festival reported average attendance at 93 per cent, followed by Glyndebourne Festival Opera as high as ever at 96 per cent, and now the BBC Proms has come in at an average figure of 87 per cent for the concerts in the Royal Albert Hall – a hugely impressive figure given the size of the venue and the diversity of the programming. With extra events at nearby Cadogan Hall, the total number of people attending Proms concerts has been the highest ever.
It is easy to look out over the waving flags at the Last Night and assume the Proms are an English tradition that is resistant to change. But a look back over the programmes of the previous 40 years tells a different story: the growth of the Proms in size, ambition and reach has barely paused for breath.
The key feature of the 2009 season has been access. The Last Night on Saturday reached the widest global audience yet, with countries as far afield as China, Japan, Belarus and Egypt signed up for the television broadcast and live satellite relays going out for the first time to cinemas worldwide. On home ground, events such as the free family Prom and “Evolution”, the Darwin-inspired kids extravaganza, banged the educational access drum. Maybe the programme set its artistic sights less high than in recent years – the season’s themes were rather footling and the absence of big American orchestras, stranded by the credit crunch, did not help – but 2009 was still a festival of huge scope.
Saturday’s concert, a typical Last Night potpourri, managed to throw in all these elements. Six new fanfares were commissioned from teenage hopefuls in the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composers Competition – a promising idea, even if the results failed to blow their trumpet with much panache. Alison Balsom was more successful at that with her nimble playing in Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, a nod to one of the year’s composer anniversaries. Other anniversary items included an anodyne performance of the closing scene from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and rumbustious playing from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under David Robertson in excerpts from Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. Sarah Connolly, the evening’s mezzo soloist, worked overtime, singing with warmth in Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and returning as a Lord Nelson lookalike in full admiral’s uniform for “Rule, Britannia!”. For curiosity value, Malcolm Arnold’s Grand, Grand Overture with its rifles and vacuum cleaners captured the Last Night spirit of high jinks. How about some “real” Arnold next year?
On the two previous nights the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra crowned the high standard of playing from visiting European orchestras with a pair of Proms steeped in tradition. The first, on Thursday, saw Franz Welser-Möst conducting two echt Viennese composers, Haydn and Schubert, with laid-back grace. On Friday, Zubin Mehta drew still richer sounds from the players in performances dangerously high in saturated fat of both Strauss’s Don Quixote, with Tamás Varga the unfussy soloist, and Brahms’s Symphony No. 4. The surprise was to see four women in the orchestra’s ranks, in effect quadrupling the female quota of years past. Even in Vienna it seems traditions sometimes have to change. Rating 4/5
