It’s a sunny afternoon at altitude – 1,082 metres, to be precise – in the precincts of France’s highest historic building, the austerely impressive early Gothic Abbey-Church of St-Robert, La Chaise-Dieu.
You can see the logic to the programming of this year’s Free Prom: famous opener with a good tune (Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre) to help wash down the new commission (Guy Barker, The Lanterne of Light), before we all get down to business with a nice choral shout (Carmina Burana). If that sounds cynical it’s really not intended to – getting this annual gift of an event right is crucial to the future of the festival itself, reaching out to the classical undecideds and getting them in to make up their own minds.
A concert of Brahms chamber music I could understand, especially given a balance between early and late. An evening of orchestral Brahms, with or without voices, needs much more special pleading. It didn’t get nearly enough last night. An expanded Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, including nine very vigorous double basses – where did the extra players come from?
Praise be to Carl Nielsen. Praise always, of course, to one of the greatest symphonists, and happy 150th birthday (again), but gratitude on this occasion is due to a programme mostly lining up Nielsen works rare and familiar, for getting me to the Albert Hall to witness a surely unsurpassable performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto.
The England cricket team recently went through seven Test matches alternating winning and losing, the longest such sequence in the history of the game. Eric Whitacre managed a similar, and similarly frustrating, series of hits and misses in his Sunday matinee Prom of American music with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
In his memoir As I Remember Arthur Bliss is reticent about his experiences on the Western Front. He describes his “purely automatic” impulse to enlist in August 1914, and later recounts the nightmares that troubled his sleep for a decade after the Armistice. He barely touches upon the injury that felled him on the first day of the Somme, the experience of being gassed late in 1918, or indeed the death in battle of his beloved younger brother Kennard – describing an unending sense of loss in a single paragraph.
Cleopatra in her barge gliding down the nave of Southwark Cathedral? Only figuratively, in the hypnotic “Half the Fun” movement of Duke Ellington’s constantly surprising Shakespeare compendium Such Sweet Thunder. Still, it wouldn’t be that much stranger than the combination of a jazz orchestra and a chamber choir – so superlative as not to need the “youth” in their names observed – celebrating Shakespeare in his local place of worship.
Sing, dance, breathe: those are the three imperatives for successful Bach performance, and three superlative interpretations at the Thuringia Bach Festival glorified them in excelsis. Frankly, I would have thrilled even to a merely good performance of the B minor Mass given its location in Eisenach’s Georgenkirche, which is to Bach lovers what Bethlehem is to Christians (not that many folk can't be both; and besides, can there really be blasphemy when it comes to the ultimate genius among composers, human as he undeniably was?).
The St Luke Passion I heard last night was my second sung Passion of the day. The first was in a parish church as a central part of the liturgy of the day on Good Friday: nothing too fancy, as befits an amateur choir, the words of St John as set by Victoria amid shining plainsong. We stood for the 30-odd minutes it took to sing, dropping briefly to our knees at the moment of the Lord's death.
When the curtain came down on Liverpool’s year in the limelight as European Capital of Culture, back in 2008, there may have been some who thought that the party was over. Things in the city’s arts world were never going to the same, however, and much has changed since 2008, mostly for the better. But there is one institution which, though it’s been through some major changes in its lifetime, is a constant on the Liverpool scene.