The days of the big choral blockbuster to launch the BBC Proms season seem long gone. Nowadays the programme, this year conducted by Dalia Stasevska, serves more as a taster menu, highlighting some of its major themes. Just a fortnight after the United States celebrated the 250th anniversary of its independence, Copland and Gershwin acted as American poster boys before jazz-inspired Ravel from superstar pianist Yunchan Lim. A choral second half included Gerald Finzi’s compact For St Cecilia, an apt ode to the patron saint of music to launch the eight-week festival.
If only the quality of the music-making had been better. After a suitably rousing performance of the Fanfare for the Common Man, with plenty of tam-tam decibels, much of the first half felt under-rehearsed. Gershwin’s American in Paris was bullish and brash – I wonder if Stasevska had a particular American in mind – with principal trumpet Philip Cobb lacing the central episode with a sleazy vibrato. The BBC Symphony Orchestra eventually found their groove, but Parisian chic largely eluded them.
There was no danger of sleaze in Yunchan Lim’s silky performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major. This was elegantly tailored playing, especially the glistening Adagio assai. It was remarkably introverted playing too, challenging audibility so that he sometimes lost out to the Royal Albert Hall’s aircon. This was undoubtedly polished, but Lim was operating in something of a vacuum, with little engagement with the orchestra which, during the first movement especially, were frayed round the edges. Things coalesced in a slick, lean finale. I didn’t have LIm down as a cocktail pianist, but his encore of Autumn Leaves whetted the appetite for an interval drink.
The Proms is an energetic commissioner of new music and the First Night commission this year fell to French-British composer Josephine Stephenson. That the sunrise not leave us unmoved takes its title from a line in May Sarton’s 1977 journal The House by the Sea, but the text is a collage of snippets from Emily Dickinson’s poems (so another nod to #America250). Sung by the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus, these words shimmered over rippling harp and woodwinds to create a swelling sunrise, noisily bolstered by the hall’s organ.
Not a world premiere, but Finzi’s rousing For St Cecilia (composed in 1947) was, surprisingly, receiving its first performance at the Proms. For chorus and tenor soloist, it sets the words of Edmund Blunden and is at its best when it nods towards Parry and Elgar. Thomas Atkins sang eloquently and Stasevska marshalled her forces with aplomb. The BBC choruses gave it their all to conclude official proceedings in a brief second half, discounting a toe-curling choral arrangement of Oasis’ Wonderwall, scheduled no doubt when England’s World Cup hopes were still alive.
