BBC Proms: talks and events

Frankly, this is first and foremost a shop-window alert to see if anyone else wants to come along to the remaining two talks I'm giving on Proms-related works: on Janáček's The Makropoulos Case tomorrow (10 August) 2.30-4.30pm at an address in Lancaster Gate, and on Mahler's Seventh Symphony, Thursday 18, same time, in St John's Wood. Addresses supplied on enquiry to me at david.nice@usa.net. Tamara Wilson is also due to return to the Frontline some time in the week of 5 September before her guaranteed-amazing performance in the Verdi Requiem on 9 September. She'll get back to me once she knows her rehearsal schedule. And you'd better believe that Tamara is almost as good a talker as she is a singer (only 'almost' because the singing is something superhuman...). There she is below with Mark Wigglesworth and James Creswell in the closing scene of Act Three from Wagner's Die Walküre.

Back in July we covered Mahler 3 and Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, and I learned a lot more simply retracing familiar territory - there's no end to what you can keep on finding in the great masterpieces. Nor did the performances disappoint - though I felt a little distanced from Haitink's magisterial and at times very slow Mahler and JEG's Roméo would have been perfect if he'd had a Friar Laurence as good and true-bass-y as David Soar for Andrew Davis earlier in the year.

Highlights of the ones I've caught so far? Unquestionably Mark Wigglesworth's converting me almost completely to Tippett's A Child of Our Time, with fabulous soloists alongside Tamara and an apotheosis that really was levitational, and 27-year-old Pavel Kolesnikov as soloist in Tchaikovsky's glorious Second Piano Concerto alongside the superlative National Youth Orchestra of Scotland under Ilan Volkov (who quite transformed the imperial style into something altogether more humanly joyous).

HK Gruber was a star yesterday lunchtime, too.

The NYO experience the previous evening was a little tainted by Ed Gardner's dim view of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra - no idea what he wanted to say, if anything, with the work - and by my neighbour, who sketched throughout. This, inevitably, I didn't mention in the review, but he started by thinking he was some kind of artistic seismograph attached to Iris ter Schiphorst's Gravitational Waves, pencilling squiggles and zig zags as the music took him. You can imagine the resulting chaos on paper. For Strauss and Holst, he contented himself by drawing the players and clearly thinking this would be the main event of the evening for his neighbours, whom he immediately started showing the results.

Halfway through The Planets, I thought that instead of getting into an altercation with him if I asked him to stop, I'd unostentatiously put my rucksack on my knee so I couldn't see his drawing, but this of course impeded his wide-ranging right hand so he got indignant. Then he and his ferocious wife changed seats. I knew she'd be spoiling for a fight at the end, and determined to avoid one, but she got it by sitting and refusing to move as we and a nice, baffled gentleman behind us wanted to get out. 'You are the rudest audience I've ever encountered!' she blustered - having fidgeted throughout and hummed along out of tune to Holst's 'Jupiter' tune aka 'I vow to thee my country' - whereupon I cried shame on her. Oh dear - these conflicts are not to be stoked, but what can one do? Otherwise, the Proms audiences haven't been bad at all, and it was redeemed the next afternoon by my being able to tell the little girls sitting in front the story of The Firebird before it began. Which meant they enjoyed it enormously, if a little actively, playing princesses and ogres, which I didn't mind at all.

Fondest peripheral memory so far: seeing the huge queue stretching around the block ten minutes before Haitink's Mahler 3 was due to start. Even though it may have been mixed up with another waiting for the late-night Bowie Prom (which I switched on the telly back home to watch live, and off when the rapper came on), it reminded me that nothing has changed since I joined the queue for his 'Resurrection' in 1978. As I recount in the Arts Desk review, it was my first Promming season and I arrived too late to be admitted into the Arena; my one and only Gallery experience taught me never to go up there again. Still, it was the summer of Discovering Mahler and Abbado's Chicago recording was the first symphony recordingr I borrowed from Banstead Library.

Thrilled, too, to take dear friend Chris Gunness's 18-year-old nephew Andrew Lavelle to Proms while he was visiting from Houston. His first experience of the Albert Hall - that was good to get - and as he has a very wise head on young shoulders his responses were all perceptive. He soon takes up a place as a very talented viola-player at the Juilliard: what discoveries lie ahead for him. There he is above with uncles and friend.

And this is the Albert Memorial at c.9.30pm. Darkness on emerging from a Prom is a sure sign that the days are getting shorter again - September visits are always tinged with a certain circumstantial melancholy.

The nearby Serpentine Pavilion is a triumph this year, one of the best, from Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. That will last us well into early Autumn.

And I have still to seek out the smaller projects around Kensington Gardens, though I'm told they're not up to scratch.

Proms photos by Chris Christodoulou except lead image of NYO, by Mark Allan. All courtesy of BBC.

Tombsongs

Only connect - Berlioz's first score of total bloody-minded genius, La mort de Cleopatre is really about Juliet after all; and so it's back to my idee fixe of last month. I listened to it again - Janet Baker with Alexander Gibson, both electrifying - in preparation for tonight's pre-performance talk before the LPO concert conducted by the electrifying Yannick Nezet-Seguin, another born galvanizer, with statuesque Anna Caterina Antonacci as the serpent of old Nile. Do come along to the main Festival Hall auditorium at 6.15 and I'll take you through some of the extraordinary sounds Berlioz gave birth to, in later composers as much as in himself. It's a help that Ravel, the other greatest orchestrator of all time, shares the programme.

So. Not only is the first part of the Cleopatra monologue hardly what the Prix de Rome judges were looking for in 1829 - it breaks up, it modulates restlessly, the aria proper never settles - but the ensuing 12/8 Invocation, vintage Berlioz, is really a preparatory study for Juliet's death (though its inspiration and final shudders are completely different from the tomb scene in the 'dramatic symphony').


Wrote Berlioz to a friend: 'I wish you could hear the scene where Cleopatra wonders "how her shade will be received by the shades of the Pharaohs entombed in the pyramids". It's awesome, tremendous! It's the scene where Juliet meditates on her entombment in the vault of the Capulets, surrounded alive by the bones of her ancestors and the corpse of Tybalt: the growing dread, the thoughts that culminate in cries of terror, accompanied by cellos and basses plucking the rhythm [which he writes out]. Oh!, Shakespeare, Shakespeare!'

Indeed. And this is another Berlioz inspiration where the music, if not the text, does the Bard justice. Anyway, I'm looking forward hugely to the performance. Better dash now, but if you can't make it, here's the peerless Dame Granite in the second-half Invocation:

Psychedelic Berlioz

It's been a hyperaesthesic, diverse ten days in London by any standards: a Spanish/Argentinian fiesta, Arab-Andalusian music (more below), the greatest violin-and-piano duo I've ever heard in the concert hall, gay men stripping off above the Stag pub in a truly terrible adaptation of Schnitzler's La Ronde, Russian women on their way to Siberia as well as hoping to get to Moscow, and even a glut of short films made by schoolkids about their pets, environment and sporting enthusiasms at East Finchley's Phoenix Cinema on Saturday afternoon (reason: the European Commission sponsored the project). But what's truly been thrumming through my brain and making me wake up early is the length/breadth of Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette.

I'm listening to about a dozen recordings - not all available or quotable - for Radio Three's Building a Library (transmission due on 5 February, assuming I've recorded it by then). And such is Berlioz's incredible invention that from hour to hour the ideas and themes in my head that won't give me any peace shift from one movement to another. His 'dramatic symphony' is the musical equivalent - and from 1839! - of Joyce's Ulysses in that for each 'scene' he makes a stylistic fresh start. Structurally, thematically, orchestrally and vocally there's nothing like it in the whole repertoire (Wagner was hugely impressed, if with mixed feelings, but he took the revolution in a whole different direction).

Clearly it's not my place to discuss the various recordings yet, but what's changed in my attitude to the piece? Chiefly the usefulness and originality of the vocal outer portions: I understand better why Berlioz wanted to set up the drama to come with his Greek chorus and soloists, and why the big operatic final scene dominated by Friar Laurence with the massed choirs (below cartoon by Dore) has to be; even though clearly it's disproportionate to Shakespeare's intentions, it makes good musical sense.


I'm also amazed by the interconnections, which mean that any movement or set of movements is diminished when heard out of context.

And what are the most feverish ideas that have seized hold of me? The start - that fabulous fugal idea, the first four notes of which were taken up, surely not coincidentally, by Prokofiev for the equivalent aggressive gesture of his Knights/Montagues and Capulets. The way he manages to write a tiny scherzetto of simple ingenuity for tenor, choir and very selective orchestra which, while it deals with the same aerial substance, is utterly different from the main scherzo devoted to 'Mab, queen of dreams'.


Which I still love best of all - its lopsided phrase-returns once the main buzzing theme has been clearly stated, the wistful cor anglais-led trio which so influenced Verdi for Nanetta's entry as queen of the fairies in Falstaff, the dream hunting-horns, the exquisite use of the antique cymbals Berlioz had first tried out in Naples' Archeological Museum (what magic there is in those three notes, p, then pp, then ppp, before they make the supernatural welkin ring).

Other simple but unusual ideas are of the essence: the distant dance-thrumming of the timpani and the tambour de basque before the aggressively brilliant Capulet ball and the offstage choral transformations after it, the vocal recitatives that punctuate the opening and love scenes, and the pitting of one-note chorus against deeply eloquent orchestral laments for Juliet's cortege (it's no mere gimmick that the roles are reversed half way through).


These are just random jottings while I'm in the thick of it. And now, if you please, Boulez (hmm) calls, followed by the mighty Munch.