Sisi Burn, photo
Monday, July 24, 2023
Royal Albert Hall, London
Portions Transparent/Opaque (BBC commission: “world premiere of Portions 2 & 3” – Proms Guide) is a fascinating thirty-minute study in sound – distant, mostly quiet, skeletal, slowly ritualistic, and requiring a centuries-old tuning system – in part reminding of John Luther Adams’s music, such as Become Ocean, https://www.colinscolumn.com/following-joan-towers-sequoia-here-is-john-luther-adamss-become-ocean-leonard-slatkin-introduces-this-fascinating-score-and-conducts-the-detroit-symphony-orchestra-in-a-performance-feb-23-2019/, maybe some of George Crumb’s output, too. Perhaps their fellow-American Catherine Lamb has a message for us, as the environmentalist Adams does, although Portions Transparent/Opaque seems without an agenda, beyond music, managing to be transporting yet also requiring focused listening to engage with many subtleties, sustained impressively by the BBC Scottish and Ilan Volkov (they premiered Portion 1) and went on to give Tchaikovsky Six, at once symphonic and suggestive of autobiography – evocative, passionate, powerful; suave and shapely (the 5/4 second movement); exhilarating while avoiding a breakneck tempo (the subsequent march), and straight into the slow Finale (which shut the clappers up), impassioned if sadly resigned to the ultimate fate (played tenderly) yet also searing until fading from earshot… a longer silence would have fitted…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001nw8w
https://www.sacredrealism.org/artists/catherine-lamb/
BBCSSO/Volkov; undated.
What can be done about inappropriate clapping? Vladimir Jurowski, before a performance of the Pathétique Symphony, made it clear the March was one of tragedy and the audience sat on its hands respecting the point he had made, something that I have always felt to be correct. Last year – I was not there – I understand the audience applauded at the end of the great Chorus ‘Praise to the Holiest in Height’ during a performance of The Dream of Gerontius. Was that enthusiasm or ignorance? Obviously there is a time to show appreciation of a performance but the indiscriminate applause from Proms audiences and elsewhere ruins concentration, can be crass and rather disturbing. If the solution os a wider use of ‘attacca’ so be it!