mon 07/07/2025

Classical Reviews

BBC Proms: Fray, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Van Zweden

Igor Toronyi-Lalic David Fray: he looks the part and he has the hands

David Fray certainly has the locks to be a piano virtuoso (eat your heart out, Franzi). And he has the looks, the troubled brow, the pallor and a suitably eccentric manner (the Glenn Gould hunch and hum came out for all the runs). But does he have the hands?

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BBC Proms: Hooray for Hollywood, John Wilson Orchestra, Wilson

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Hooray for Hollywood! The title of last night's Prom didn't officially have an exclamation mark. But if any concert deserved a screamer, it was this one. A delirious mutual enthusiasm pinged back and forth from stage to audience all night as the slick John Wilson Orchestra and its eponymous chief (with excellent vocal support) romped through the highways and byways of the golden age of the American musical.

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BBC Proms: Elijah, Gabrieli Consort & Players, McCreesh

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Mendelssohn loved looking back. And nowhere more so than in his blockbuster oratorio, Elijah. But what was most striking about last night's monumental performance at the Proms was how much he was also clearly looking forward and outward, and how feeble an appellation oratorio seemed to be for what we were witnessing. We were being bombarded with pre-echoes of the adventure-laden Hollywood epics of the 1950s.

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BBC Proms: BBC Singers, Sinfonye, Hollingworth, Wishart, Cadogan Hall

alexandra Coghlan

Twelfth-century abbess, healer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen had no formal musical training. Perhaps because of this her music – exquisite arabesques of chant melody, animated by the conviction of her religious beliefs – creates a language all its own, a “swaying bridge between heaven and earth”, as she characterised it.

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BBC Proms: Graham, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, Davis

stephen Walsh Colin Davis and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester: the old leading the young

The spectacle of an orchestra named after Mahler playing Stravinsky irresistibly calls to mind Stravinsky’s report of a performance of the Eighth Symphony in Zurich in 1913. “Imagine”, he wrote to Maurice Delage, “that for two hours you are made to understand that two times two makes four.” Oddly enough, repetition is the lifeblood of Stravinsky’s own music, though he rarely makes two times two equal four, and his symphonies don’t last two hours (nor, incidentally, do Mahler’s).

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BBC Proms: Douglas, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Dausgaard

David Nice Thomas Dausgaard: a febrile, fluent presence striking his own path through Wagner and Brahms

Having been away in remote mountain places, I hadn't heard that the BBCSO's chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek was taking a month off to recover from a virus. So it was a bracing last-minute shock to find the man stepping up to the podium to conduct Wagner's Meistersinger Prelude not the orchestra's wise Hans Sachs but a Walther von Stolzing in conducting terms, tipped unexpectedly by one source outside the BBC as Bělohlávek's successor. Lean and hungry Dane Thomas Dausgaard...

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BBC Proms: London Sinfonietta, BBC Singers, Atherton, Cadogan Hall

Geoff Brown

Sirs Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies have now been at each others’ heels for almost 60 years. First, the composers were students together at the Royal Manchester College of Music. Then, once their careers began flourishing they kept rubbing against each other in concert programmes. Inevitable, really: the same organisations commissioned them; they were the Twin Peaks of British Modernism. Even now, for old times’ sake, the pair can’t escape each others’ shadow.

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BBC Proms: Ax, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Haitink

Ismene Brown

"O, reason not the need!” cries Shakespeare’s King Lear, insisting on certain unquestioned rights. The phrase came to me listening to Bernard Haitink conducting Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto and Fourth Symphony last night. The 82-year-old Haitink does not question the need for this music - and I’m not sure that’s entirely right. I want the imperative there, I want to feel the urge to be born in those musical paragraphs that Brahms wrote with such generous largesse. To reason the need gives...

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BBC Proms: Ax, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Haitink/ Hewitt, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Manze

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, and one work dedicated to Brahms by Schumann. That's right: it was Brahms night at the Proms. No scary new works. No discombobulating new interpretative glosses - dear old Bernard was our guide. Nothing to ruffle the feathers or impede the thirsty ways of the professional champagne-quaffers in the sponsor boxes. Nothing to fear or disturb that is, except for around a dozen LEDed vulvas garlanding the stage.

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BBC Proms: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov/ Viktoria Mullova, Matthew Barley

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Landscape painting may be dominated by the Dutch. But in music it is the Austrians who know best how to evoke the majesty of the great outdoors. In the first of last night's two Proms, one of the most awesome of Anton Bruckner's snow-capped symphonies, number five in B flat major, accompanied a new high climb through the Tyrol from fellow Austrian Thomas Larcher for two great musical off-pisters: violinist Viktoria Mullova and cellist Matthew Barley.

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