Here’s Perry Como to set the scene…
Anything you like, any genre/occasion, concerts/recordings, revelatory/remarkable … bagpipe recital in kitchen.
Mine, of many, would include – first off – being entranced by Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of Animals (Skitch Henderson’s Decca recording), at school aged eleven (thank-you Mr Palmer), which catapulted me into the hitherto unsuspected world of Classical Music, where I remain, fascinated. Certain performances stay in the mind as special – such as Celibidache and the LSO in a simply miraculous Debussy La mer; Leonard Slatkin and the St Louis Symphony in a powerful & poignant Strauss Heldenleben (David Halen, concertmaster); and Frank Sinatra at the Royal Albert Hall. There was my first interview – for which I was insanely nervous, but needn’t have been for Colin Davis couldn’t have been friendlier (touched upon here, http://www.colinscolumn.com/bbc-proms-2020-sir-colin-davis-conducts-the-lso-sibelius-tippett-beethoven/), and numerous other interviews, and then being able to stay in contact afterwards – a nice bonus – and my first recording session, Vernon Handley and the RPO in Robert Simpson’s Fifth Symphony for Hyperion, ‘Tod’ himself, Andrew Keener and Tony Faulkner all warmly welcoming.
However, this is more for you to share, if you wish, any of your magical music memories. Mickey is keen to know.
Since this post was published, prompted by a friend in fact, I have thought of further special occasions: Karajan and the Berlin Phil delivering a flawlessly played Mahler 6; Maazel and the LSO compelling attention with Bruckner 7; as pristine an account of Debussy’s Images as can be imagined when Boulez returned to the BBCSO as a guest (early-nineties); and a totally gripping rendition of Birtwistle’s Triumph of Time from Vernon Handley and the RPO that reached hair-raising climaxes, ‘Tod’ telling me later that the score is a “work of genius”. Indeed. Colin
My first prom, 1970 or 1971: Sir Adrian Boult conducting Elgar 1. This was a highlight during a jaunt to London with Fretwork founder Richard Boothby, fellow pupil from Barry Boys’ Comprehensive. We queued for the arena, and when the doors opened, we ran like crazy for a place at the front, then looked up at that dome. Breathtaking. Then we looked up at Sir Adrian. Magisterial. A potent cocktail of self- and musical discovery for a susceptible 17 year-old.
Not quite your dates, Andrew, but I assume this was the Prom for Boult’s Elgar, a winter concert (part of a one-off short Proms season) that ACB shared with Roger Norrington: https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/ewp6q9
I’m getting old, Andrew! My first Prom 1951 August Constant Lambert’s last concert – he died a week later: Rio Grande (Kyla Greenbaum) & Ravel La Valse; next year 1952 – Britten’s Piano Concerto (Jacques Abram) and Violin Concerto in same programme! Sargent conducted; May 1963 New York – Britten Spring Symphony with Lenny – greatest performance I ever heard, as was Prom on August 1976 Prom Rachmaninoff Second Symphony with SNO/Gibson. 24 years later, recording the SNO in Glasgow, I mentioned that Rachmaninoff to a couple of players and one said he was there and they all felt at the time it was one of Alex’s finest. John Lill Beethoven 3 same concert. Ah well!
Bob, this will be Lenny’s Spring Symphony then?
http://www.colinscolumn.com/continuing-the-spring-theme-here-is-brittens-symphony-of-that-name-performed-by-the-new-york-philharmonic-leonard-bernstein-in-1963-audio/
On March 27th 1953 I was at the Royal Festival Hall listening to Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. He had reached the final , emphatic repeated chords prior to the fast coda. At this point Beethoven puts a fermata over a rest, giving the conductor licence to pause for as long, or indeed as short a time as he might wish before the exciting culmination of the work. In Furtwängler’s performance the length of this pause was incredible. Second after second passed, the musicians, the conductor, the audience, indeed the hall itself were all utterly silent. I have never experienced such tension in a concert hall before or since: there was no sound, yet the music was incredibly alive. A moment of overwhelming dramatic impact achieved through complete silence.
No, Colin, I think that the ACB Elgar 1 prom was part of the regular summer season – at least I’m pretty sure it was. If it was a winter prom, Richard B. and I would have had to play truant from school in Barry, which we did, admittedly, on some occasions! But I’ll check the dates. Meanwhile, here’s another Damascene musical moment, experienced on one such truanting occasion to London, all by myself. I must have been 16. I walked in to the HMV shop at 363 Oxford Street (RIP) to hear cello and piano playing which blew me away. Turned out to be Beethoven’s D major Sonata, the du Pre/Bishop recording – mid priced HMV’s HQS series for you fellow anoraks out there. I bought it there and then with hard-earned pocket money, happily forfeiting a meal to do so. Although I have that recording on CD, nothing will make me part with the vinyl with its sleeve photo of those two young virtuosi!
Then Boult’s Elgar 1 was maybe this, 1970, but see below:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e2v4fx
Sorry Andrew, I overlooked this earlier on the proms database.
A few nights before, ACB had conducted Gerontius: https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e5nc8g
But, another ACB Elgar 1, 1971:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e66v2m
And another in 1976:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e8v9rz
Aged 10 or 11; to the cinema alone to see 2001 and discovering ‘The Blue Danube’. Aged 17 my first Elgar APOSTLES: the rather forgotten Maurice Handford with tenor Richard Lewis etc. Same year: SOUZAY at RNCM Faure & Ravel with 2 encores especially magical: the child’s aria from ‘L’Enfant’ (sic) and his beloved ‘Azulao’ by Ovalle. Arvids Jansons with the Halle dedicating the 11th to the recently deceased Shostakovich and holding the massive score to his heart. The Ring in Manchester when ENO toured…..At university, WNO in Oxford in my first MIDSUMMER MARRIAGE with John Treleaven (very moving film by his son on Sky Arts about him..recommended) and Felicity Lott. Pretre conducting PELLEAS at the Opera Comique. More recently several ELGAR 1 concerts: Andrew Manze at the Halle, Ed Gardner in Basingstoke, Oramo in Stockholm 2019 and Sibelius 5 2020 in Liverpool with Manze. And we must not just look to the past: just last night a superb VW2 with Petrenko: did he learn them from Andrew Manze in Liverpool?
Sibelius 5 was 2021 of course…those first weeks of the return of live concerts were so uplifting.
VW2/Petrenko review:
http://www.colinscolumn.com/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-at-royal-festival-hall-vasily-petrenko-conducts-coleridge-taylor-hiawatha-vaughan-williams-a-london-symphony-boris-giltburg-plays-beethovens-emperor-piano/
Ah…rooting among my shelf of prom prospectuses (as they were called once upon a time), I find that the Boult/Elgar 1 that I attended was on 2 August 1971. In the first half Norma Procter sang Bliss’s The Enchantress in a flaming red dress, and the orchestra was the LSO. Happy days…
For classical music i remember an outstanding performance of Carmina Burana by an amateur orchestra at eltham church ! Unfortunately can’t remember the name of the orchestra but the choir might have been eltham choral society My piano tutor was in the choir ! What made it really special was the intimacy and acoustics of the venue. Its the only time ive seen a concert in a church. Very uplifting.
Had many other special musical moments with other genre’s of music as well
Friday 23rd September 1960, my first encounter with 20th century greatness. That history-making Cold War night the 106-strong Leningrad Philharmonic under their aristocratically-borne supremo, Evgeni Mravinsky, came to the Festival Hall, the first Soviet orchestra ever to appear in England. Why did we go? Certainly not for the politics, the KGB security, the national anthems (a customary courtesy those days). Nor the warm-up, Mozart’s Symphony No 33. No, we, like everyone, were there for Shostakovich’s wartime Eighth Symphony, to be given in the presence of the composer (sitting reticently in the Royal Box, gaunt, bespectacled, edgy, torment-laden) by the grand conductor, the virtuoso orchestra, the friends for whom he’d written it. The occasion was monumental, inspiring, nerve shattering. The C minor tale of Beethoven Five I knew. That of Shostakovich’s Eighth was painfully something else. I was unprepared for such a ‘tombstone’, such a requiem aeternam-dies irae-lacrimosa-libera me for companions lost, for the forgotten dead of the forests and killing fields of the war into which I was born. ‘The mystery of music,’ Shostakovich’s champion (if occasional critic) Danil Zhitomirsky believed, ‘is the mystery of life, of human passions and multifaceted motives’. I couldn’t put it into words then, but, somewhere indefinably within, that’s pretty much how I felt. I listened, unprejudiced. Open ears, open mind. As later with the Fifth and Fifteenth Symphonies heard in London under the composer’s son, Maxim, certain things marked the evening, retrospectively the ingredients that elevate a Shostakovich performance beyond ordinary telling into ‘authentic’ narrative. When the music whispered, the world stood dark and frozen as the steppe. When it climaxed you felt assaulted by the physical ferocity, the tortured, dissonant screaming of the sound. It was like being impaled through your seat: you felt emotionally affronted, you wanted to escape but couldn’t. When the going got fast you risked burning by the naked, high-voltage electricity of it all. It left me in awe. In 1999 BBC Legends released their tapes of the concert. I bought a copy. But it was a long time before I had courage to open the box. Would it be as titanic, as intense as I remembered? It was. And more. In the applause my clapping, my parents’, mixed into history. Re-living it, hearing again the coughs and silences, the cheers, was strangely like unlocking some long-forgotten sonic diary, passing through a door back to an hour that was once our youth.
[from an essay in ANDANTE Istanbul, February/March 2004]
Anything new that suggests it will still be played in years to come.
It’s not so much what I have heard that is magical, but what might have been magical from three great and favourite pianists that I never heard live, Curzon, Richter and Michelangeli. I like to think I would have been spellbound in their presence with the journey home afterwards a happy distraction of fond memories forming.
I’m not sure of the date but the first time Muti and the Philharmonia presented Prokofiev’s music for Eisenstein’s film of Ivan the Terrible, fabulous music in a fabulous performance. Some time later they repeated the score and then EMI recorded it.
Many memories but the first recalled is Klemperer’s stereo version of the Eroica symphony which made a huge impression.
Anything played by Joshua Bell and anything sung by Joan Sutherland.
I adore French music, so of course Ravel and Debussy. Daphnis and Chloe (Monteux, Boulez recordings) and La Mer (quite a few, including Munch, Stokowski and Elder) are two of my absolute favourites French scores.
It sounds a little down-market in this company, but I was stunned and knocked out by West Side Story. It definitely made a difference to my life.
Clifford Curzon’s recordings of Schubert.
1987, Barbican, Michelangeli playing Gaspard de la Nuit; simply extraordinary. Also May 1979, Karajan and Berlin Phil at RFH performing Bruckner 8. Whole piece was one great arch of sound.
The first time I heard Richard Goode play, it was a Beethoven concerto, and it logged me into a spiritual guide to music of wonderful quality.