Crash! A roar of tamtam and drums, a shining beam of trumpet-call: Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man beamed out to a capacity crowd in the Royal Albert Hall and to broadcast and internet listeners galore. The Proms are back – and what a way to begin them.
The 250th anniversary of US independence notwithstanding, the Proms’ ethos was always about the “common man”, or “common person”, to provide the best music at low prices to the largest possible audience. But in the old days, you could stand nightly through the Proms without hearing one note written by a woman, and without seeing any female conductor on the podium. This year, nine conductors are women and at least 27 Proms contain music written by women. It may not sound like much, and it is far from 50 per cent, but, honest to goodness, in this context, it is progress.
As recently as 2013, when Marin Alsop conducted the Last Night of the Proms, it was the first time in 118 years that any woman had had that job. People (mostly blokes) get sick of women like me making a fuss about this – but women are not a minority cause. We’re half the population and we shout because we don’t want to have to shout anymore. And the fact that so few eyelashes are being batted over it this year may mean that finally it’s working.
Last night did more than that. On the podium was the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief guest conductor, Dalia Stasevska, a positive, generous-gestured powerhouse musician who can sometimes be found driving lorryloads of aid to Ukraine. On the programme was the world premiere of a new piece by the British-French composer Josephine Stephenson. That the sunrise not leave us unmoved, on poetry by Emily Dickinson, is her celebration of heightened joy within the unpredictability of a dangerous world – which perhaps is (partly) what the Proms is for. A deep lungful of summer, this was fine-boned, textually responsive music that soothed and scrunched, mesmerised and soared.
It was, all in all, a clever programme, drawing together American, British and French music. Following the brief Copland, Stasevska launched the BBC Symphony Orchestra into a twinkletoed account of Gershwin’s An American in Paris, with forces swelled by three saxophones and a row of Harpo Marx-like taxi horns. First trumpet Philip Cobb gave a beautifully hammy account of the big blues solo. All that was missing was Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.
Nine female conductors will participate in this year’s programme (Photo: Chris Christodoulou/BBC)If Ravel influenced Gershwin, that friendship worked both ways – and in Ravel’s jazz-age Piano Concerto in G major the soloist was Yunchan Lim, at 22 one of the most feted pianists on the planet. His playing made no concession to the cavernous hall or its noisy air-cooling system (which we couldn’t in any case have done without); he conjured from the instrument a 360-degree range of glimmering colours and half-lights, a peppering of seemingly effortless brilliance and a deep, radiant legato, not so much projecting to the back row as pulling us all in towards him. His encore, a transcription of Joseph Kosma’s Autumn Leaves, was both touching and an inspired choice.
After the Stephenson premiere came a choral work by Gerald Finzi from 1947, the ode For St Cecilia, with words by Edmund Blunden. Finzi (1901-1956) is a composer many of us try hard to love. Like Stephenson’s new work, this piece celebrates a source of joy – here the patron saint of music – at a time of reckoning, commissioned around two years after the end of the Second World War. On the one hand, it echoes the pompous side of Hubert Parry, and on the other hand, the stirring film music (Henry V) of William Walton; while richly melodic, it also proved deeply forgettable. Even so, it could scarcely have sounded any better, given a persuasive soloist in tenor Thomas Atkins and the massed forces of the BBC Symphony Chorus and the BBC Singers, whose rapt, tender account of Blunden’s lines evoking the spirits of Dowland, Byrd, Purcell and Handel polished the family silver to perfection.
And finally? A surprise encore of the England football anthem, Oasis’s Wonderwall. Hmm, perhaps that was planned before last Wednesday… Still, who needs football when we have 85 more Proms? It would be worth paying the licence fee for them alone. Dear BBC Director General, the Proms are a national treasure. Whatever next year brings, please don’t forget that.
Watch this Prom on the BBC iPlayer: Bookings can be made on the Royal Albert Hall website.
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