Photo, Andy Paradise
Friday, September 5, 2025
Royal Albert Hall, London
As we enter the final week of this year’s Proms season, there are several works scheduled that have recently come my way in memorable performances… beginning here with Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, in a relay from Salzburg with the Vienna Philharmonic and Andris Nelsons. This is not a comparative review, rather Nelsons’s conducting stays in the mind in outline and for some specifics. On its own terms, however, Jonathon Heyward led a Tenth that connected to the intrinsic qualities of the music – the lament and shadows of the expansive first movement, expressed as an emotional detachment, expressive flute and clarinet solos – situations observed – that flared into unbridled protest – going public – as if Shostakovich could no longer keep his fears to himself, Heyward musically scrupulous with line and rhythm, if not everything the trumpets play. Then a whirlwind Scherzo, said to be a portrait of Stalin, here in a rage, angrily pacing, wearing out the carpet, although timpani could have been bolder. The third movement can fall away at times, but Heyward kept interest in it through changes of character, and the Finale came across as light out of darkness (possibly), if taken at face value, Heyward and Chineke! Orchestra dancing, although the polite timpani once again compromised the moment and the end is no place to do that.
In the first half, for all the excellent playing (Chineke! is now ten), The Bamboula (a type of African drum) suggested its composer (1875-1912) as searching for an identity, tempo contrasts too marked, the twain not meeting, although his dates question whether he had enough time to forge something personal; yet, in certain passages, hindsight suggests he was paving the way for Eric Coates. The Covid-related Fanfare that followed also suffered a lack of style; that said, the colours and dynamics within the piece are fastidiously notated and were responsively addressed by the brass and percussion members. Simon Rattle intended to include music by George Walker, which for Heyward became a score by James Lee III, Visions of Cahokia, “the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the Central and the Southeastern United States, beginning around 1000 CE.” If a tad samey across its three movements, a personal touch was evident, and certainly image-creating.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: The Bamboula
Valerie Coleman: Fanfare for Uncommon Times
James Lee III: Visions of Cahokia (European premiere)
Dmitry Shostakovich: Symphony No.10 in E-minor
Experience the ‘electric atmosphere’ of a performance by the Chineke! Orchestra – Europe’s first minority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra. They perform Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony: over 50 minutes of brutality, violence, despair and terror, followed by two minutes of triumph. A portrait of life – and death – in Stalin’s Russia, it’s a fierce act of musical testimony. The Prom opens with the steady thrum of Coleridge-Taylor’s orchestral dance The Bamboula, while works by US composers James Lee III and Valerie Coleman form the concert’s American-accented centre.
lhttps://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002hls1