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Aand we are back. “The world’s biggest music festival” has spread through the doors of the Royal Albert Hall for another eight-week season. That Last Night of Pledges it’s often surprisingly diverse – a self-made party for a diverse audience – First Night is a celebration of long-termers, setters and seasons in microcosm. So what about this year?
Regardless of the world’s problems, the “special relationship” remains intact in the concert hall. America’s 250th anniversary of independence is front and center this summer (because patriotism is always embarrassing if it belongs to someone else), trumpeting from afar – what else – Aaron Copland’s Fanfare of the Common Man.
Galvanizing the BBC Symphony Orchestra with the evolution of his brand, the main guest conductor, Dalia Stasevska, we did not take our eyes off the broad ideas of hope and eternity before Copland skillfully and mysteriously brought them down to the streets: to the crowded streets and traffic jams of Gershwin’s Paris.
Stasevska gave us not only an American in Paris but also an American view of Paris. This was a broad, benevolent story, big and bright, stacked tightly against each other in scenes from wind and brass. There’s no time for pastimes and people-watching here, but the BBCSO (along with some of the finest woodwind and brass musicians) had him on every airless track.
It might be US 2 – France 0 but the two countries already had a rematch in the form of Ravel’s New York-accented Piano Concerto in G major – South Korean megastar Yunchan Lim soloist. If this was French music it was the France of Le Corbusier, Boulez and Brancusi: cold, pure and ruthless. Not for Lim the jazz-bar appeal of the final presto, or the rhapsodic excitement of the allegramente climax. Instead we found accurate training in the visual fields, and slow movement of the visual flavor so that it was not well felt in the hall. It was for a pianist who, for all the performances that follow him, seems to refuse to watch.
So far, very consistent. But the desire to be all things to all men began to flourish after this time. The new work from Emily Dickinson to the Anglo-French composer Josephine Stephenson did not have much to say, but she said it loudly, while Finzi never heard that St Cecilia was encouraging, but very well pretending to be Hubert Parry or Vaughan Williams. Chorus Thomas Atkins did well with Edmund Blunden’s cod-Horatian verse, and the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus gave a full Jerusalem but the scene only enhanced the piece’s small stature.
Fortunately the BBC did the trick for extra time. The Wonderwall River because many voices and musicians are expected as a tribute to the World Cup but it arrived differently than what happened this week. A tribute from Manchester’s greatest (and Andy Burnham’s beloved band) to the minister-in-waiting. Who says Promises isn’t it politics?
