Odaline De La Martinez on the Cover of BBC Music Magazine
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CHINEKE! ORCHESTRA CURIOUS CONCERTOS Chi-chi Nwanoku on her trailblazing BME ensemble Unlikely works for Jew’s harp, trautonium and more! 125th ANNIVERSARY The people who shaped THE PROMS From Henry Wood to Anna Meredith, we reveal the movers and shakers who have defined a great British festival Also in this issue Scheherazade Music inspired by the Orient Johannes Brahms A guide to A German Requiem Carolina Eyck The theremin’s master player and much more… CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU 26 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE Proms people The biggest stage: Andrew Davis conducts the 2018 Last Night of the Proms NNIVE A RS th A 5 R 2 Y 1 THE PEOPLE who shaped the THE PROMS To celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Proms, Michael White introduces the extraordinary figures, past and present, who have moulded and changed this august and unique music festival he Proms have never been a simple concert series: they outgrew that almost from the start, turning into a statement of the nation’s musical credentials – with peculiar status as a platform for what counted as significant at any time from T1895, when they began, through to the present day. It’s a responsibility that hangs (occasionally like a millstone) round the neck of Proms administrators, and it’s why Proms seasons matter. But they matter, too, as a community of people who across the years have been the flesh and blood of this great enterprise. Proms people. From conductors and soloists to generations of audience members, there are thousands of them, so the few I’ve picked to celebrate here can’t be more than illustrative. But they give a sense of how the Proms season has developed over time, shaped by successive personalities into a mighty celebration that survived two world wars and will survive what the world is facing now. Albeit with some adaptation. BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 27 Festival figures: (right) a 1926 cigarette card of Proms founder Henry Wood; (far right) conductor Malcolm Sargent and violinist Paul Beard in 1962; (below) the badly mistreated Edgar Speyer Henry Wood (1869-1944) Henry Wood was 26 when, in 1895, he was hired to lead a brand new season of ‘Promenade’ concerts at the Queen’s Hall; and he remained in charge for the next half-century, conducting some 5,000 of them. With 700 premieres and so little rehearsal time it was crazy. When conductor Thomas Beecham said, ‘I don’t know how you do it: it would kill me’, Wood’s reply was ‘Yes’. And it did almost come to that: in 1902 he had a breakdown. But he was always a larger-than-life character: flamboyant on the podium Park life: Aida Garifullina entertains in 2019 to a degree that few British conductors Proms in the Park before him had thought appropriate, and prompting Queen Victoria to ask him How the Last Night moved outdoors ‘Tell me, Mr Wood, are you quite English?’ The idea of a He most definitely was, and always Proms in the championed English music – not least Park event Vaughan Williams, the premiere of whose back in the Fifth Symphony amid the war-torn 1943 mid-1990s was season remains one of the Proms’ most pooh-poohed by symbolic moments and a complete cycle John Drummond of whose symphonies (five to date) was (see p31) who programmed shortly after Wood’s death. suggested he’d Wood, though, also introduced audiences be happier to unfamiliar European repertoire and watching the last Night of stood up for the German classics at the the Proms on telly than sit ‘in a damp height of anti-German feeling. park’. But the old curmudgeon was The initial premise of the Proms was, as money came with the requirement proved wrong, and in 1996, 28,000 expressed, to ‘train the public’ into broader that everything be performed at lower turned up at London’s Hyde Park to musical awareness; and Wood’s training than usual pitch (to prevent damaged watch Sheridan Morley present a programme had a comprehensive reach. voices), and that a fountain be installed mix of classical and popular artists, He taught his audience not to applaud in the promenading area to purify the air with a live link-up to the Albert Hall between the movements of a long work. (the audiences smoked like chimneys). for the second half of the Last Night. He also taught them to accept female But when in 1902 the money ran out, Millions listened on BBC Radio 2. orchestral players, introducing women to insolvency loomed. Things were only Such was its success that an annual his band in 1913 (though he didn’t want his saved by Speyer, who came up with the event was born. By 2005, Proms in the Park had spawned sister events ladies playing trombones). present-day equivalent of £220,000 a year in Belfast, Manchester, Swansea and His credentials as a truly great conductor to underwrite the season. Glasgow, with each ‘region’ celebrating are debatable, but he had no shortage of Speyer’s money came from a family its identity through performances admirers. One was Schoenberg, for whom business whose interests included the of Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Wood was a ‘perfect musician, great creation of the Northern, Piccadilly Sea Songs. Presenters such as Terry educator, great benefactor of music, and Bakerloo lines of the London Wogan (above) and Alan Titchmarsh and most charming gentleman.’ Underground. He lived in a Mayfair sealed the Proms in the Park as a mansion where he entertained the likes ‘middle-of-the-road’ event, while its Edgar Speyer (1862-1932) of Elgar, Grieg, Debussy and Strauss. broadcast was organised by BBC Live Concerts don’t run without But he was widely generous, Events, rather than the BBC Proms department. Today, Proms in the money, which is where Sir helping to create the Whitechapel Park thrives – last year’s featured Edgar Speyer slips into the Art Gallery in London’s East End soprano Aida Garifullina alongside story of the Proms. When and part-funding Captain Scott’s Barry Manilow, Lighthouse Family and they began, the funding ill-fated trip to Antarctica – for Chrissie Hynde, all accompanied by came from a surprisingly all of which he was rewarded the BBC Concert Orchestra. rich laryngologist whose with a baronetcy. 28 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE Proms people his song (it was a song, not a hymn) in 1916 Born into modest circumstances was an unequivocally patriotic Queen’s that few would have guessed from the Hall rally for an organisation called Fight aristocratic manner he assumed, he for Right, set up to support the war effort. came to the attention of Henry Wood as a But soon after the premiere Parry grew composer and was invited to conduct his uncomfortable with Fight for Right and own An Impression on a Windy Day at a handed over his song to the Women’s Prom in 1921 (see p6). But the conducting Suffrage movement, with which he turned out to be more impressive than the felt more sympathy. By then the song score, and a career was born. was orchestrated. But it had no Proms He was a fine technician: confident, The only problem was his parentage: the performance until 1942 and didn’t make clear, ice-cool under pressure – not least Speyers were German, which didn’t bode it to a Last Night until 1953. Since then it’s during wartime concerts where he had a well in World War I. Edgar was accused surfaced with robust insistence every year. habit of encouraging his audience to stay of spying, almost certainly without Whether the singing audience give put as the bombs dropped down. And he foundation, then hounded out of Britain. much thought to William Blake’s text is was lucky, conducting the last ever concert Whereupon the Proms fell into penury another matter. It’s ambiguous and could at Queen’s Hall on the afternoon of the day again – saved this time by the music mean anything from an attack on the it was destroyed by an incendiary bomb. publishers Chappell, who agreed in 1922 to Established church (the real ‘Satanic Mills’ All this made him famous, and he underwrite them so long as the second half being cathedrals) to a celebration of free cultivated a profile – partly through the of each concert provided a platform for the love (those ‘arrows of desire’). Blake was a charismatic charm with which he drew popular ballads that Chappell sold as sheet radical free-thinker, not a member of the nimble Messiahs from north-country music, a promotional deal that literally Women’s Institute. And Parry too turned choral societies, but also through the papered over an injustice. out to be a liberal-progressive whose Proms’ Last Night, which he remodelled rejection of conventional Christianity as a platform for himself. He actively Hubert Parry (1848-1918) would never have accommodated any encouraged the disorderly exuberance of Parry’s music always featured in the hope to see the Lamb of God in England’s the crowd, insisting that ‘if people get as Proms, but for more modern audiences his pleasant pastures. enthusiastic about music as they do about connection rests with one piece: Jerusalem, football, it is all to the good.’ beloved of Last Night audiences, though Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967) His players grew less enthusiastic, their understanding of it is perhaps not Adored by audiences and amateur though, finding him aloof and shallow; quite what the composer planned. musicians, Sargent brought undoubted and the sharp-cut suits and buttonhole He was a country-gentleman: Etonian, glamour to the Proms, presiding over them carnations he wore perhaps endorse that wealthy, living in a country pile in as chief conductor for two decades (1948- view.