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Three heatwaves, but summer doesn’t start until Prom starts, and on FridayRadio 3 and the BBC Symphony Orchestra light the blueprint for eight weeks of music production at the Royal Albert Hall and beyond. Like me, you’ve probably gone through the Proms catalog and listed the concerts you wanted to hear, but what always surprises me as the summer of music unfolds are the concerts you never would have predicted; concerts that may seem strange on paper but in the performance they find a special joy, be it bands making their debuts, new songs and the first Proms, or just the alchemy that means concerts that are days or weeks apart create a connection of music and production that you would never have imagined.
Predicting surprises and revelations of a season that has not yet begun is a futile and contradictory task, but the new songs that are presented there are many tasks that should be compatible with their pen. The world premiere of The First Night Josephine Stephenson‘s That the Rising Sun May Not Leave Us Unmovedand Jessie MontgomeryCello concerto for Abel SelaocoeThese Righteous Ways, at July 20they are supposed to make a strangely different combination – Stephenson has written beautiful songs and poetry while Montgomery and Selaocoe’s collaboration promises a soul-searching power. “A creature that slowly absorbs the orchestra and the audience into its breathing body” wrote Michelle Assay at the first North American performance in Toronto.
And I will never miss the vision of two different orchestras opening concerts a few days apart: György KurtágStele, performed by Sakari Oramo with the BBC Symphony 22 Julyand Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen‘s Among the Trees, with the London Philharmonic and Edward Gardner on 27 July.
Three steles short but confusing moves and the music of music, music and history. Kurtág has said that this piece, performed at the Berlin Philharmonic in 1994, is a vision “of someone lying wounded on the battlefield. The fighting is all around him, but he only sees a very white, blue sky… His feeling is that there is nothing more important than the sky”. Written in memory of his friend, writer and teacher András Mihály, the work begins with the words of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio: octaves that represent the arrest of Florestan, and his hope. But Kurtág’s piece does not produce. The blue sky is impossible in the Larghissimo-Adagio movement, especially in the breakdown of depression. the second partin which the main chorus is consumed by unrelenting, unrelenting conflict, before the final movement is an unrelenting journey into oblivion, a permanent wasteland of purgatorial desolation.
Pictures of Tjøgersen Between the Trees, written in 2021this time, it is the Nordic vision, the hope of worshiping nature. Created with the legal care of the orchestral image and the idea of Kurtág, Tjøgersen’s inspiration is to take his audience on a “musical journey”, an orchestral journey that, as he says, “gives the audience the feeling of being inside the forest instead of watching from afar”. His work begins with his representation of the sound of squirrels eating nuts, and is inspired by the interplay of fungi through which trees connect and communicate. You will hear birdsong from magpies, owls and magpies, as well as old orchestral recordings of pastoral harmony: quartet of horns, oboe solo.
And through the purgatory and pastoral harmony, there are new sounds of the original music of not one but two three concertos this season: Édith Canat de Chizy’s Skyline, for three soloists and timpani on. 18 Augustand after a few weeks 6 Septemberthere is a Gwilym Simcock concerto for three-star BBC Young Musician of the Year alumni, saxophonist Jess Gillam, horn-player Ben Goldscheider, and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. And among the pieces, there is another world-famous performance from Thea Musgrave, her bassoon piece Out of the Darkness, created for Amy Harman, on. 23 August.
And there are two parts of Dante by Thomas Adès to look forward to, with the singer introducing the song. National Youth Orchestra in Purgatorio (8 August), with Gustavo Dudamel in the lead Los Angeles Phil in Inferno a few days later; The LA Phil also plays in the UK for the mighty Gabriela Ortiz Diamond Revolution.
And, the music of the 21st century aside, what I have chosen at the end of the season is the group of Jupiter and the lutenist Thomas Dunford in Dowland and Purcell on July 21, and on the last night, the Mahler Academy Orchestra plays the instruments that Mahler knew and sent them to the Vienna Philharmonic. Theirs recording the Ninth Symphony is a true revelation: I can’t wait to hear them live.
Summer is starting here – and I hope the Royal Albert Hall’s air-con is out, otherwise you’ll be hearing the sound of defrosters and Radio 3 presenters. Good luck studio!
Meobsessed with seeing again Night of the Night by Julia DavisThe darkest and funniest TV drama ever made – hit me up! – and his terrifying creation Jill, whose reign of terror destroys Cath and Don and everyone else he touches, I’ve been listening to Ennio Morricone’s My Name Is Nobody, who acted. chirpy title track he is also the subject of Nighty Night. Morricone was brilliant in this picture, sending Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries to The Wild Horde, and writing one of the most universally satisfying themes in Good Luck, Jack. And these are the first three signs!
