THE PROMS LISTENING SERVICE Radio 3’s Tom Service proposes onward sonic explorations inspired by the music of tonight’s Prom

BERNSTEIN politicians’ speeches, the actual sounds of start – carry a freight of feeling that becomes their voices. The Austrian composer Peter an overwhelming torrent at the dance’s On the Waterfront Ablinger’s Voices and Piano project is a climax. The start of the finale of the The porous boundary between film scores transliteration of dozens of recorded voices ‘Pathétique’ Symphony is another series and concert music has been a feature of of famous historical personalities for piano, of descending steps turned into a melody much 20th- and 21st-century music. Vaughan in which the pianist plays alongside the that seals the tragic fate of the symphony’s Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica, his Seventh, was words, turning speech melodies into protagonist. Moments such as these – or, made from his score for Charles Frend’s 1948 magnificently and sometimes hilariously from the other end of the emotional filmScott of the Antarctic: VW was given a dissonant clusters and commentaries. Bernd spectrum, the orchestral melody at the start privilege granted to few composers for film Alois Zimmermann’s gigantic Requiem for of the First Piano Concerto, one of the and was allowed to compose the music he a Young Poet (1969) is partly made from a greatest melodies ever written which we hear wanted to – even before the film was palimpsest of the words and recorded voices once and never again in the piece – prove shot! – around which Frend cut the film, of political leaders: Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, the secret of Tchaikovsky’s success. It’s not which is why the music makes such a strongly Churchill, Papandreou, Dub∂ek. Their voices that he is only celebrating the cult of himself ‘symphonic’ impression and why the are projected over a thrilling but terrifying (to paraphrase Boulez’s criticism of him): self-sufficient symphony has so much musical sonic landscape; they are the baleful instead, these melodies have such incendiary ice in its veins, from its imposingly chilly progenitors of the destruction that the power that they belong to us the moment opening bars to its lamentingly desolate final Requiem is protesting against. More recently, we hear them, when they sear themselves on moments. Korngold’s Cello Concerto takes in Nitin Sawhney’s 2001 Neural Circuits, a to our emotional consciousness. the relationship between film score and recording of George W. Bush’s declaration concert hall to an even deeper level of of war after 9/11 is subsumed by a sonic connection, since it’s a fuller version of a onslaught as Sawhney vividly opposes the concerto that’s an essential part of the drama West’s response to the attacks in a violent of the 1946 filmDeception . The composer orchestral toccata. and conductor Hollenius writes a piece that’s played by Karel, his love-rival for Christine’s TCHAIKOVSKY affections; Korngold’s concerto is a piece of Symphony No. 5 hyper-abundant lyricism and emotional outpouring, expanding and exploring the How did Tchaikovsky turn the base metal of melodramatic story of the film, as Christine the simplest building blocks of music into kills the despotic Hollenius just before the tunes that open up seams of sheer, premiere. unadulterated feeling? A classic example is the horn tune at the start of the slow COPLAND movement of the Fifth Symphony, in which a single note, when it’s repeated with different Join Tom Service on his musical odyssey in The Listening Lincoln Portrait harmonies in the third bar, seems to contain Service on BBC Radio 3, Sundays at 5.00pm, from Music based on political speeches isn’t always a whole world of emotions – nostalgia, 3 September. Go to The Listening Service on the Radio 3 as laudatory and glowingly optimistic as melancholy, joy, sensuality, all at the same website to hear clips, watch animations, download previous episodes and listen to the Proms Listening Service playlist. Copland’s. In fact, in the rest of the 20th and time. That’s just one example: in his music for 21st centuries, much of it just the opposite: The Nutcracker, in the Grand pas de deux, Visit the Proms website these three pieces, in different ways, throw a Tchaikovsky makes a descending scale – for articles and more from rather different light on the recordings of that’s literally all it is, that tune, at the the Proms Listening Service.

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