BBC Young Musicians at the Proms Launch

Here, in the pink thanks partly to the lighting, are two pianists from among past winners: Lara Melda (2010's victor, then known as Lara Ömeroğlu) and Martin James Bartlett, 17 when he took first prize along with saxophonist Alexander Bone in 2014. Perhaps the one significant step forward for the BBC Proms this summer is to bring together 21 Young Musicians of the Year (as they were formerly called) in a single concert, marking the event's 40th anniversary. Lara and Martin will be repeating their tour de force, featured first time round with the Aurora Orchestra, as specimens in the 'grand zoological fantasy' of Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals, always a delight. Who'll play the Swan? Sheku Kanneh-Mason or one of the other three cellists represented, including Sheku's mentor Guy Johnston?

The reception had a special setting this year, after many sweltering gatherings in the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall of the Royal College of Music - the Imperial War Museum, looking less grim and Bedlamish than usual on a day of summer-in-spring. My photos of the gathering were taken before and after the great throng, from which you'll gather I lasted the duration.

The reason for the location was the Proms' commemorating the centenary of the last year of the First World War. The theme reminded me that my paternal grandfather's reconnaissance mission at the Front took place on 7 April 1918 in Fampoux Field to the east of Athies, 100 years ago this month. As related in the History of the 5th Dragoon Guards published by Blackwood in 1924 in my first entry on Captain George Nice - and it seems apt to repeat it here -

Second Lieutenant Nice of A Squadron was afterwards awarded the Croix de Guerre for his gallantry in reconnoitring under heavy rifle and machine gun fire to try and find a route for the regiment to make a further advance in the direction of Greenland Hill.

1918 was also the year in which Parry completed his richest choral music, the Songs of Farewell. At the launch the BBC Singers gave a very nuanced performance, stilling the party crowd, of 'My soul, there is a country,' the only one of the set I know, from All Saints Banstead days*; I came to marvel at the rest when working on a talk for Tim Reader and his Epiphoni Consort, who sang a selection. Sakari Oramo will conduct the entire set - and I think they do need to be heard in one concert, if not necessarily all together at once - in a Cadogan Hall Prom on 20 August.

Looking through the Proms prospectus - our usual pleasure in revelation at the pre-event gathering with David Pickard and Alan Davey was pre-empted by the untimely morning announcement of the whole lot - the Cadogan events strike me as much the most enticing in terms of repertoire. There aren't many great surprises in the rest, though DP made the very good point that what looks ordinary on paper can be transfigured by the unpredictable magic of the Albert Hall (conversely, it can let some pieces down). And there will be thousands who've never heard Shostakovich 4 before - it has to be worth it from Nelsons and the Boston Symphony.

To my surprise Bernstein's MASS isn't on the cards, a Proms piece if ever there was one - though I've had my vision to last the next five years. West Side Story (complete in concert for the first time) and On the Town are, under the peerless-in-that-rep baton of John Wilson.

Cue my chat with Martin and Lara (I knew the former a bit from his Southrepps recital and trio performance). MJB's quirky imagination revealed itself when we were chatting about Bernstein, I told him how, courtesy of my then editor at The Guardian Ted Greenfield, I shook the great man's hand at a recording session for Candide before he (MJB) was born, and he said that Lenny was the person he'd most like to have met. But then he thought about it and commented that probably you'd have the man's entire attention for five minutes and he would be charming, and then switch it off. Like Ripley.

I did a double-take. Yes, Patricia Highsmith's Talented Mr Ripley as immortalised cinematically in Plein Soleil, which MJB hadn't seen, and Minghella's beautifully filmed, scary and poignant masterpiece, which he had (Matt Damon's Ripley pictured above), and we talked about it, and told Lara she had to see it.

Well, it was a grand evening, and though I sometimes dread the thought of chit-chat, there were so many welcome faces, some of whom I asked along to the Europe Day Concert. Several key folk will be involved in that whom I met at the fabulous Pärnu Music Festival, which is a roundabout way for me to close in saying that the orchestra I'm most looking forward to seeing at the Proms, following the usual heavenly (we hope) week, will be the Estonian Festival Orchestra under Paavo Järvi (a chat with David Pickard at the Multi-Story Orchestra Prom last year encouraged that set-up, I'm told). Here the 2016 vintage is on the beach at Pärnu, a typically wonderful shot by the great Kaupo Kikkas.

 Only connect: they'll be opening with Arvo Pärt's Third Symphony, the UK premiere of which father Neeme conducted with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in 1989 - an event which led to my first ever visit to Estonia a few weeks later. Terviseks (Estonian for Cheers!) to all those Järvis!

*RIP Choirmaster DAH/David Harding. I can't say much more except that he was the most inspirational figure in my musical education.

Masters’ farewells: Strauss and Parry

Until I worked on the programme notes for a very curious concert a month ago at St John’s Smith Square which I’d been asked to talk before and during, I wondered what Tim Reader, conductor of the newly-formed Epiphoni Consort (pictured below on the day of the concert), and his colleagues were thinking of: could great-blaze masters Richard Strauss and Charles Hubert Hastings Parry have much in common?

It soon became clear: Parry’s six Songs of Farewell, of which I only really knew the first from All Saint’s Banstead days, ‘My soul, there is a country’, are total valedictory masterpieces in their sphere, equal in their own more extended, specific way to Strauss’s Four Last Songs (by the way, the top picture should have been a sunset, but I settled on the rainbow we caught on a drive back from the high Maiella range in Italy’s Abruzzo region to our lodgings in 2009 simply because we were playing what I still think may be the best 4LS I know on disc – Harteros’s with Luisi and the Staatskapelle Dresden – and had to stop the car to listen to ‘Im Abendrot’).

Parry’s medium is a cappella choral writing, from four to eight parts. His instrumentation has never struck me as anything special, though well-padded orchestration supports those earlier panoplies ‘I was glad’ and ‘Blest pair of sirens’ well enough. But leave him alone with a choir, and wonders result. Listening and score-gazing, I marvelled at the modulations and the word-sensitivities, most moved by what would be a perfect funeral anthem, ‘There is an old belief‘, a nuance-perfect setting of a poem by John Gibson Lockhart. The one to hear on CD is the incomparable Tenebrae's (the Epiphonis are very much of that ilk) but I'll settle for YouTube's Vasari Singers, a notch below both - you may need to look up the words, which are essential*.

Tim asked which of the six I’d recommend for performance; after some discussion, I’m flattered that we settled on this and its successor, the very rich realization of Donne’s ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’. 

I knew the Epiphoni Consort would be first-rate, and the choir's interpretation of Strauss’s Deutsche Motette, the toughest work on the programme, was infinitely finer than the BBC Singers’ Proms performance (no wobbles, richer body of sound, better soloists – I already knew that Catherine Backhouse is a star, and I loved the tenor sound of William Morgan). But I was pleasantly surprised by the instrumentalists’ contribution. The Bloomsbury Chamber Orchestra is an amateur ensemble, of course, and with the usual attendant problems of intonation, but what a difference it makes when a conductor is firm of purpose, as James Lowe was in Tod und Verklärung. Sounded to me, too, as if they had imported a professional first trombonist, and the horns were very fine, too.

Biggest surprise of all was how well soprano Charlotte Newstead coped with the insanely long phrases of the Four Last Songs: the top isn’t the freshest, but the middle range was golden, the overall assurance again streets ahead of the Proms singer, Inger Dam-Jensen.As a result, this one actually moved me.

Enjoyed, too, working on the note for Brahms’s first choral gem, the Geistliches Lied he composed at the age of 23, even if it was a tad thrown away right at the start of the programme. I haven’t tuned in to any of Radio 3’s Brahmsfest, but I’m more in love with this genius than ever thanks to three programme notes for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Exploration of the profound Horn Trio led me back to the fabulous recording by Isabelle Faust, Teunis van der Zwart and Alexander Melnikov. I hadn’t listened properly before to Melnikov’s performance of the Op. 116 Fantasien. It totally won me round to the 1875 Bösendorfer on which he plays here: the Allegro passionato has a tumultuousness which just doesn’t sound the same even on the most resonant of contemporary Steinways. Anyway, Melnikov is one of the relatively unsung greats, and this confirms it. None of his Op. 116 is up on YouTube, so I've settled for his performance, on said Bösendorfer, of the Op. 4 Scherzo.

As for the piano concertos, now that I’ve done proper homework on them I’m  even more eager to hear my idol Elisabeth Leonskaja in a never-to-be-repeated evening of both with Okko Kamu conducting the SCO – worth travelling to Glasgow or Edinburgh to hear, I’d have thought. One special fascination was cued by a typically brilliant observation from the late, lamented Calum MacDonald. He points out that Brahms’s manuscript words ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’ below the violin melody of the First Concerto’s Adagio may refer to more than just the Latin Mass. They’re also the inscription above the entrance to the abbey where Hofkapellmeister Kreisler seeks refuge from disappointment in E T A Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, my second-favourite comic novel (Don Quixote will always remain No. 1).  As this was also one of the young Brahms’s favourite books, and he was himself known as Kreisler by his circle, the connection seems plausible. At any rate, it furnished further quotations from Hoffmann for the note which link back to the concerto’s turbulent opening.

I’d forgotten that Hoffmann lived in Bamberg for a formative four years, shortly after which he brought out his first collection of tales, Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner (annotators also overlook this when writing about Mahler’s forest funeral march in the First Symphony, also in Callots manier). So apart from the unreal, extensive and other-worldly beauty of Bamberg which so overwhelmed me when I was there recently, the Hoffmann connection was a bonus. 

The House-Museum was closed on the days I was there, but we walked around the square which embraces not only the great man’s poky dwellings but also the theatre where he was engaged, first unsuccessfully as the director and then as machinist, scene-painter and composer. 

Its interior is, I’m told, preserved as it was, but the shell is modern. At least it includes his own caricature on the glass

and there's a recent statue of writer and cat in the space before the theatre.

In a street winding up one of the town’s seven hills, the curiously-named Eisgrube leading to St Stephen's Church, there’s also the door-knocker which in Hoffmann's most fantastical story The Golden Pot turns into the face of the ugly old Apple Woman of the Schwarzthor. The tale is nominally set in Dresden, but it seems imbued with the more medieval atmosphere of Bamberg.

My cicerone, Matthias Hain of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, told me the famous knocker now turns up everywhere – as candy, mementoes etc. I had no idea, and saw none. Anyway, it was good enough to turn me back to re-reading the tale. And I feel in a mood for Murr again; but there’s Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers to surmount first. And I owe a few reflections on the second reading of Doctor Faustus here. Eventually. Long-overdue Norfolk Churches Walk chronicle next, with apologies for work deadlines getting in the way.

*so here they are:

There is an old belief,
That on some solemn shore,
Beyond the sphere of grief
Dear friends shall meet once more.

Beyond the sphere of Time
And Sin, and Fate's control,
Serene in changeless prime
Of body and of soul.

That creed I fain would keep
That hope I'll ne'er forgo.
Eternal be the sleep,
If not to waken so.

I was glad

Yes, he does look like many of the old Bufton-Tuftons in today's Westminster Abbey congregation, without Elgar's sensitive eyes to offset the walrus moustache, but Charles Hubert Hastings Parry could do a good bit of pomp and circumstance. My colleague Jessica Duchen violently disagrees about the worth of 'I was glad', to which a far from unattractive Kate Middleclass processed up the Westminster Abbey aisle a couple of hours ago, but it gave me all the usual frissons, especially in the full-orchestral version. Alongside it, the new John Rutter and Paul Mealor pieces seemed respectively cloying and a tad dreary (and 'Blest Pair of Sirens' felt a bit like overkill, but good to hear that too just when the whole thing had got almost too boring to watch, which sadly applies to the Bish's sermon too).

The frissons date back to my chorister days: on every summer cathedral course - and I 'did' Worcester, Hereford, Gloucester, Exeter and Lincoln - the Choir of All Saints Banstead would tearfully serve up 'I was glad' as the anthem of the final evensong*. In 1977, in a service which also included one of the earliest performances of Walton's Silver Jubilee Mag and Nunc, we even got to sing the 'Vivat Reginas'. They're the only thing which gives the edge to this St Paul's Cathedral performance on what I belatedly realise is the Queen's Golden, not Silver Jubilee**. Alas, it comes in half way through the organ prelude, but hold on for the trumpeters and the spine-tingling bursts of acclaim.



So much for a Golden Jubilee which I don't even remember. Can you believe it, back in 1977 - and I am opening myself up to such derision here - I even kept a Silver Jubilee scrapbook. Now I find the royals, whether sweet, Shrekish, grotesque or bland, totally irrelevant. Not that I don't wish this pair their rightful share of happiness. Peter Tatchell is a bit more belligerent, but puts some of his points very well.

*writes choirmaster DAH: 'By the way, we didn't always do I was Glad on the cathedral courses. We used to alternate it with Zadok, another coronation war-horse! My main worry was to stop the choir bursting into tears before the final top B flat!' Fellow former chorene Mary Amorosino and I remember it was Zadok only once, but who can confirm?

**said Mary has also just pointed out that it couldn't possibly be the Silver Jubilee because Wills and Harry are in the front row. Careless of me.