- The Observer,
- Sunday September 2 2001
Royal Albert Hall, London SW7/ Radio 3/ BBC2
Bleeding chunks, pieces of Wagner ripped largely from the solid flesh of the Ring and served up as a Wagner Night, were a regular mainstay of the Proms until musical correctness made us queasy. They still, however, are smuggled in, as on the menu of late Romanticism offered by the Kirov and their still charismatic, if somewhat careworn music director Valery Gergiev. A whole joint of Die Walküre and a sliver of Die Meistersinger promised to be succulent and chunky enough for any promenading gourmand. 'The Ride of the Valkyries' wasn't scheduled, or at least not on the printed programme. You only had to add up the timings for each piece and subtract from the estimated finishing time to notice something was afoot (so much for spontaneous encores). But this all-time favourite, played at break-neck speed, was the rousing reward Gergiev gave his audience, consolation for enduring the two gamey dishes which made up the bulk of the evening: Schoenberg's symphonic poem Pelléas and Mélisande and Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem of Fire Op 60.
Perhaps those names, Schoenberg and Scriabin, explain the empty seats for what should have been a sell-out concert. Daunted at the prospect of astringent, etiolated modernism, people stayed away. In fact nothing could be more indulgent than these two works, which ooze and glisten in puffy, buttery splendour. Schoenberg wrote his Pelléas in 1902-3, about the time Debussy was completing his opera to the same doom-laden Maeterlinck play. Harps and bells, massed brass (why use one trombone when five will do?) and quadruple woodwind ensure the sort of roof-raising, ear-splitting blasts which have recently prompted doctors, in all paradoxical serious ness, to urge musicians to wear earplugs. That a genius on Schoenberg's level could so mishandle his material gives him a certain quaint charm to set against his familiarly forbidding image.
The Russian Scriabin was another matter. Immersed in mystical and messianic goings on, he was almost as obsessed with Wagner as he was with India, perfume, spiritual and physical ecstasy and, above all, himself. His one mark of distinction was his claim to see colour through sound. To the synaesthetically challenged among us, his outpourings all sound monotonously purple. The Proms, keen to help us understand the true subtleties, had mounted a small-scale light show for his Poem of Fire (not to be confused with the almost identical Poem of Ecstasy ), following the composer's guidelines. Thus spotlights of red, lime and blue cast their liverish light on the heads of the Prommers. At the end, the Crouch End Festival Chorus rose to quasi-metaphysical transcendent heights to pro vide the wordless, ecstatic chorus, not dressed in the white robes the composer wanted (and hoped the audience, too, would wear) but nonetheless bathed in dazzling lights from overhead. The Kirov played with appropriately languid swagger, and found their way through the layers of roseate polyphony with valiant clarity, if to little avail.
By the time they tackled Wagner, they seemed drowned in a surfeit of notes. For one moment when Wotan (Vladimir Vaneev) opened his mouth and rolled his Slavonic consonants round his tongue, I couldn't think which Tchaikovsky - or was it Mussorgsky? - he was singing. The shock realisation that this was Wotan's Farewell in German indicates how far from idiomatic, or rather the wrong sort of idiomatic, this performance sounded. After the disaster of the company's recent Covent Garden season of Verdi (the other reason, alas, for the empty seats?), hopes were high that their Wagner would restore standards. Gergiev should be as exciting a conductor as any in this repertoire: febrile, perceptive, driven. In that Valkyrian encore, some of the old brilliance was in evidence.
The build-up to the final fortnight of Proms begins in late August with the arrival of a shoal of visiting orchestras. The NDR Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg gave a warm, incisive account of Schubert's Symphony No 9, 'Unfinished', conducted by Günter Wand in his ninetieth year and bringing true heavenly insight to his interpretation. The Boston Symphony Orchestra gave a pair of concerts with Bernard Haitink, in which he demonstrated an affinity with French music, notably Ravel's Daphnis and Chloé . Television viewers were treated to the rare sight of Martha Argerich playing Prokofiev's mechanistic Piano Concerto No 3 in partnership with the NHK Symphony Orchestra and her one-time husband Charles Dutoit. Unaccountably, she ranks this as a favourite work. In any case, she played it with thrilling, percussive vigour.
The high point, however, was the return of Pierre Boulez, who did so much - with William Glock - to shake the Proms out of postwar torpor with iconic Roundhouse concerts and a refusal to obey convention. He was reunited with his old companions, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who sounded better than ever. In Bluebeard's Castle , Michelle de Young (Judith) and Laszlo Polgar, with the women of the BBC Singers, sang with chilling ardour. The players of the BBCSO, alert to Boulez's rigour, played exquisitely. Bartók's icy score glittered, each facet polished and brilliant. No one coughed or moved. Andras Schiff has of late been upbraiding his audiences for their frailty in coughing while he plays. The truth is that there can be levels of ultimate engagement when mind and body, including fickle throat and ticklish tubes, are as one in the act of listening. But it takes a Boulez to cast that spell.
