Fauré: Requiem, Gounod: Messe de Clovis Le Concert Spirituel/Hervé Niquet (Alpha-Classics)
When you stop to think about it, Schwanengesang is a pretty ridiculous thing. Schubert’s final song cycle was famously put together by his publishers after his death, and so it’s barely a cycle at all. Therefore, unlike Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, there’s no story and, even worse, the lurches in mood between the songs are so extreme that they can become absurd.
This Prom by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Nil Venditti featured a first half of Welsh composers, including the belated Proms debut of Karl Jenkins at the age of 80. It’s a sign of how Proms programming has evolved over the last 30 years that either of them gets a look-in and, even if I had some mixed feelings about their pieces, it can only be a good thing that they are now being heard in this festival.
Founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra first performed at the Proms – to a rapturous welcome – in 2003. For two decades the visits, and the audience rapture, have continued, while the region of most WEDO players’ birth now looks, this hideous year above all, more steeped in blood and hate than ever.
When you’re running a three-concert residency, you can afford to take a few repertoire risks, to programme a few things that might be close to your heart but which won’t pack in the punters.
Let’s begin at the end. Can the Paris Olympics' closing ceremony offer anything as classy or joyous as 260 musicians aged 13 to 18 singing the French carol-plus-farandole finale of Bizet’s L'Arlésienne music?* This encore also made Proms history as a unique riposte to the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra’s instrument-twirling Bernstein “Mambo”. And what a sequel to a Mahler One brimming with energy, masterfully negotiated by conductor Alexandre Bloch.
Arthur Bliss: Works for Brass Band Black Dyke Band,/John Wilson (Chandos)
This was my first Prom of the season – always an exciting moment, even in my fourth decade as an attendee. I was hearing the BBC Philharmonic under its newly appointed Principal Guest Conductor, the excellent Anja Bihlmaier, in a programme of two giants of the 19th century Romantic repertoire separated by warp & weft by the American composer Sarah Gibson.
The Queen’s Hall isn’t going to know what has hit it after the opening weekend of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. What’s usually the festival’s demure home of chamber music – string quartets, piano trios and so on – was still recovering from Jakub Józef Orliński’s theatrics from Saturday morning, when it encountered this scorching performance of choral music from the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela (★★★★★).
When I first started attending the Edinburgh International Festival in the 1990s, the Opening Concert (capitals intentional) was a grand Usher Hall affair on a Sunday evening; a central work of the western classical tradition to set the festival running. Not any more. They’ve steadily moved the opening of the festival forwards over the years (the first of 2024’s preview events took place last Thursday) and this year the opening concerts take place over not one but two nights.