Urged on by the cheering of 6,000 people – mercifully no flag waving; that’s yet to come – music won but theatre came a breathless and flamboyant second at Wednesday’s Prom 43, which had its own dual lap of honour by two of the most gilded musicians alive, Daniel Barenboim and Martha Argerich. Now in their 70s, friends since early childhood as musical prodigies in Buenos Aires, he is still the pugnacious, illustrious, classroom leader, she the shy, unknowable, reluctant superstar.
Argerich had cancelled as soloist in the same concert in Salzburg only last week. Luckily Barenboim, conducting, was able to fill the vacant piano stool. Would the Proms, and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – formed in 1999 to unite musicians from across the Arab-Israeli divide, and popular Proms regulars – be luckier? They – we – were. After the orchestra had played Jörg Widmann’s Con brio, a witty, allusive concert overture, Argerich walked on stage, a little hesitant. Barenboim left her to take the applause alone, watching from the side. She looked almost desperate, beckoning as if to say “don’t you dare leave me here”. In his own good time, he took his place on the podium.
They plunged into Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 1, commonly regarded as one of the most vulgar in the repertory, “filthy and vile”, as one 19th-century commentator put it. Clearly he had not heard it played properly. Liszt gave the premiere himself in 1855, with Hector Berlioz conducting, which must have been quite some event, neither of them shrinking violets. It’s a bewitching, compact work, but only when the soloist can make sense of the crazy excesses of pianism: double trills, vaulting octaves, thunderous, hammering chords and, in contrast, delicate, almost operatic recitatives and twinkling, winking little melodies accompanied by tinkling, jingling little triangle.
Argerich could do it all, barely a blemish, treating the music with the seriousness it deserves. The result was electrifying, somehow not flashy, warmly accompanied by the West-Eastern players. Then more theatre. Barenboim, hand by now locked tight in Argerich’s, like children in a playground, guided her on and off and around the stage until at last they yielded to noisy pressure – after a certain amount of allowable crowd-milking – and played one of their duet favourites: Schubert’s Rondo in A, D951.
This work of prolonged quietude was the last he wrote for piano four hands, in the summer before his death in November 1828. Barenboim leading, and Argerich, taking the “secondo” part, almost if not quite out of the limelight, played with ease, intimacy and trust. This was tender music-making, steeped in six decades or more of friendship. We could have gone home happy, but after the interval the orchestra and Barenboim played resplendent Wagner preludes and overtures which showed the Divan, especially the brass, at their brawny and muscular best.
They did not, however, eclipse the week’s other highlights. In Prom 39, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with chief conductor Sakari Oramo, shone incisive light on Haydn’s Symphony No 34 in D minor, defying the soupy acoustic and pinpointing every detail. Oramo, also a violinist, is making his influence felt: the BBCSO strings were lithe and crisp. In Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, conductor and players together emphasised its lyrical quality, not only in the central, waltzing Scherzo and “giocoso” finale, but even in the dark opening movements, avoiding indulgence and intensifying the work’s potency.
The centrepiece was Charlotte Bray’s cello concerto, Falling in the Fire, a BBC commission world premiere with Guy Johnston as soloist. The bombing last year of ancient temples in Palmyra, Syria, was Bray’s starting point. A menacing belch of brass, dominated by trombones and tuba, launches the work with a jagged, rat-a-tat triplet fanfare out of which the solo cello emerges in lonely lament. Batterings of high woodwind, spiky and insistent, alternate with episodes of almost numb fragility. Balance in the Albert Hall is not easy, but listening again on iPlayer the cello was always audible. Some of Bray’s delicate yet astringent chamber music was performed by the Albany Trio in a Proms Extra event. This British, Berlin-based composer, still in her early 30s, now has a growing catalogue and an assured and independent artistic voice.
Another work for cello and orchestra marked a rebuilding rather than a destruction: in Prom 41, Colin Matthews’s Berceuse for Dresden (2005) was given its London premiere by the Hallé and conductor Mark Elder, with Leonard Elshchenbroch as soloist. Written to commemorate the reconstruction of Dresden’s Frauenkirche, bombed in 1945, this orchestral lullaby prizes gentle optimism over sorrow. Pitches and overtones of the church’s eight bells shape both melody and harmony in sonic reconciliation. The Hallé, on bracing form all evening, delighted in the busy detail of Berlioz’s showcase overture King Lear, and gave an ambitious reading of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with tenor Gregory Kunde and mezzo-soprano Alice Coote. Coote’s delivery of the final, distant dissolution of Der Abschied, hushed and fragmented, brought concord to a work that does not always hang together. She and Elder, white-faced and drained at the end, looked as if they had glimpsed infinity.
Marginally more earthbound but not in the buoyancy of their playing, in Prom 40 the Britten Sinfonia performed two short symphonies, Beethoven’s Eighth and Prokofiev’s “Classical” – in each case, crystalline and graceful – and two concerto-style works, by Francisco Coll (b1985) and Thomas Adès (b1971), who also conducted. Steven Isserlis, mellow-toned and poetic, was the soloist in the Adès, a reworking for orchestra of Lieux retrouvés (2009, arr. 2016). Mercurial and luminous, full of hidden ideas, it conjures water, mountain and field, ending in town with a sardonic, Offenbach-inspired can-can. The violinist Augustin Hadelich brought suppleness and flair to Coll’s Four Iberian Miniatures, glittering with Hispanic idiom and sharp, Andalucian light.
A few words on two groups who deserve more: Stile Antico and Fretwork performed an immaculate Proms Chamber Music lunchtime concert of choral and viol music, from Byrd and Morley to Huw Watkins and Nico Muhly. “Sleep, fleshly birth” by the 17th-century composer Robert Ramsey, a raw meditation on death, made you glad to be alive to listen. For a Proms season that on paper looked potentially tame, 2016 is proving quite wild.
- The Hallé’s Prom 41 will be shown on BBC4 on 25 August. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s Prom 43 will be on BBC4 on 28 August.
- The Proms continue until 10 September.
