With brave face and make-do cheer, the BBC Proms 2020 launched its 125th anniversary year last weekend: not in its usual Royal Albert Hall home with a packed arena, but on screen and radio only, and with no clear idea – at least as yet announced – of how this season, crushed by pandemic, will end. A neat ruse in ordinary times maybe, but now a frustration for all. Live music is promised at the Albert Hall from 28 August. With no other option, the Proms team has had to adopt that age-old musicians’ tradition of vamping till ready. They’re still vamping, heroically. Earlier this month the government announced that indoor concerts could go ahead from 1 August, but uncertainty rules.
Highlights from the archive, skilfully programmed, must satisfy us for now. Since this year’s First Night included Claudio Abbado’s final Proms appearance from 2007 – one of the greatest performances in living memory – no one should complain. The adored Italian conductor, by then frail, led the elite players of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No 3. This all-consuming epic takes in, and in a performance of this intensity gives out, all life.
In contrast, the first part of this nominal opening Prom mixed shock of the old with non-shock of the new. Harrison Birtwistle’s Panic, never intended as a Last Night piece but finding itself there amid union jack hats and controversy in 1995, sounded stark yet lyrical, with its dedicatee, John Harle, the dazzling saxophone soloist. As a prelude to the Beethoven anniversary season, players from the five BBC orchestras performed Beethoveniana, a buoyant premiere – the only non-archive novelty on offer – by the versatile composer Iain Farrington. He has cleverly smashed Beethoven’s nine symphonies into an entertaining, bitty, seven-minute stylistic pulp. I enjoyed listening first time, and on second encounter on BBC Four. Whether it was the best use of 323 BBC musicians from the five orchestras and BBC Singers, two dancers and five engineers, is a separate question.
Another item that had to be pulped, straight after being printed in February, was the BBC Proms Guide – more of a loss than might first appear. With its itineraries, essays and indexed lists of works, composers, premieres, ensembles, soloists, this indispensable publication is far more than a listing. It’s part of Proms history: an annual snapshot of changing tastes, a vital guide for the musical traveller to wander independently around 70-odd concerts and see what appeals. I can now relate to poor Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With a View, lost in Florence without a Baedeker. Some of the essays have been rescued and put on the Proms website.
The rest of a full opening week of listening included the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1996) in Beethoven’s Leonore, the rarely heard first version of his opera, Fidelio – here excitingly realised by John Eliot Gardiner and a top cast. In a recital from Cadogan Hall in 2015, Jeremy Denk played Beethoven’s last piano sonata, No 32 in C minor, Op 111. If you want to comprehend this astonishing piece, beyond what your ears tell you, Denk’s brief description of its bizarre mechanics is a must-listen.
With operas every Saturday night and a throng of brilliant concerts, we must make our own private tradition of nightly listening and solitary clapping and cheering. It might – should – make us value the Proms all over again. Those Prommers who usually wave yellow buckets at the exit doors (last year raising £121,000 for musical charities) have already taken their fundraising energies to social media: a far harder task, and in a year when musicians need that support more desperately than ever. Help them if you can.
As others struggle to work out how to perform “live” – which now means, mostly, not in fact live but pre-recorded, edited, streamed, then made available for either a fixed or indefinite period – a few enterprises stood out. Prompted by lockdown, Emmanuel Pahud (principal flute of the Berlin Philharmonic) and Daniel Barenboim commissioned 10 new works for a live festival at the Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin, with some meaty discussion about the purpose of culture. Roxanna Panufnik’s world premiere Heartfelt, for the Sacconi Quartet, was also live: a beautiful, imaginative exploration of that vital, beating organ (in this case the heart of a bear) on which we depend. The concert was given in aid of the Royal Society of Musicians.
The pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, compelling and poised in Beethoven, Barber and Gershwin, gave the opening recital of this year’s Ryedale festival. Sharing that familial abundance of talent and charm, unaffected by the relentless media attention, her brother Sheku Kanneh-Mason was a poetic soloist in Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto, with the Philharmonia conducted by John Wilson. The orchestra, expertly filmed as part of its online Philharmonia Sessions series, had managed to gather a fair-sized ensemble in Battersea Arts Centre. After the concerto, the Philharmonia strings played their hearts out in Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, as if their very existence depended on it. Ours too.
