Another Sunday evening concert at the Wigmore Hall, this time to explore the church music of Haydn and his contemporaries with Peter Holman, Psalmody and The Parley of Instruments.
We heard:
Joseph Haydn – Three Psalms from Improved Psalmody (Ps 31, Ps 41, Ps 69)
Charles Burney – The Dialogue Hymn: Tell Us, O Women
John Stafford Smith – Horrible is the End of th’Unrighteous Generation
Joseph Haydn – The Emperor’s Hymn: Poco Adagio from the String Quartet in C Major, Op 76/3
Joseph Haydn -Give to God Our Thankful Songs
William Gardiner of Leicester – Give to God Our Thankful Songs
John Foster of High Green, Yorkshire – The God of Gods the Lord Hath Call’d
Johan Arnold Dahmen – Three Songs from Eleven Sacred Songs
Johan Arnold Dahmen – Two Psalms from Improved Psalmody
Samuel Webbe Senior – Where, Lord, Shall My Refuge See
William Shield – My God, My King with Joyful View
Thomas Greatorex – This is the Day the Lord Hath Made
Samuel Webbe Junior – Variations in A Major on “”Adeste Fideles”
Joseph Haydn – Three Psalms from Improved Psalmody (Ps 61, Ps 26, Ps 50)
Jolly good it was too, in the hands of these experts.
We took The Duchess (Janie’s mum) with us to this one – the only Prom we did with The Duchess that year. She was partial to youth orchestras, so this Saturday evening concert was the obvious pick for The Duchess that year.
We took a Monday off work to enjoy a lunchtime concert at the V&A, then meander around that space and then go to the evening Prom at the Royal Albert hall.
This was the lunchtime concert:
Francesco Gasparini – Quanto sei penosa
Arcangelo Corelli – 12 Trio Sonatas, Op 1 No. 9 in G major
Innocenzo Fede – Bellezze voi siete
Innocenzo Fede – Sei pur dolce
Innocenzo Fede – Violin Sonata in D minor
Alessandro Scarlatti – Correa nel seno amato
London Baroque was the chamber orchestra, with Charles Medlam leading and Catherine Bott beautifully belting the soprano bits.
For reasons no-one (not even herself) can explain, Janie is quite partial to Shostakovich, yet cannot abide Prokofiev.
Anyway, a client offered Janie a pair of fine seats at this concert and we said yes.
According to my log, we:
bumped into John and Angela [Kessler] there.
From memory, we encountered cousin Angela and John, rather than actually having a collision with them. I don’t think I knew, at that time, that Angela was on the Board of the LPO and I suspect that Angela and John were too polite to mention that fact.
We heard:
Bernd Alois Zimmerman – Trumpet Concerto “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See”
Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony No 7 in C, Op 60 “Lenningrad”
Janie and I loved the Leningrad Symphony as performed that night by the LPO under the baton of Kurt Masur. I didn’t see the following review at the time, but Brian Hunt in The Torygraph bore out our assessment – he absolutely loved this concert:
This might well have been another pair of hand-me-down tickets from one of Janie’s wealthy, music-loving, globe-trotting clients. Or perhaps Jilly at that time. My log is silent on the matter. It doesn’t feel like the sort of thing I’d have booked myself.
No matter – it was a very good concert, in that Midori is/was quite a special talent, who emerged as a child prodigy in the 1980s, then withdrew from public performance in the mid 1990s and since then occasionally reappeared. This was during one of her reappearance phases.
It was good to see her perform chamber style rather than with a big orchestra, although most of her concerts on that tour, by the looks of it, were big concerto stuff. In truth the Barbican Hall is not ideal for smaller scale works, but still it worked.
We heard:
Claude Debussy – Sonata in G Minor for Violin and Piano
Maurice Ravel – Sonata for Violin and Cello
Camille Saint-Saens – Fantaisie for Violin and Harp in A Major, Op 124
Gabriel Faure – Quartet for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello No 1 in C Minor, Op 15
I remember especially enjoying the violin & harp piece. Very charming. Here are some other people performing that Saint-Saens work.
Another trip to the Proms with The Duchess (Janie’s mum) to see the European Community Youth Orchestra. The Duchess had a bit of a thing about youth orchestras.
This concert, under the baton of Bernard Haitink, was surely interesting if for no other reason than that. A great opportunity to see the great man.
We heard:
Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major
Anton Bruckner – Symphony No 7 in E major
Emanual Ax tinkled the ivories in the first piece of the night.
I don’t think this was the best rendition of Bruckner 7 I have ever seen…nor even the best rendition by Haitink, as we returned three years later to see the great man perform the same piece again, with the Berlin Philharmonic that time…but I think the following panning by Rick Jones in the Standard is a bit unfair.
I think The Duchess must have chosen this one. I don’t remember her being partial to a bit of Brahms, but she must have been. I am quite partial to Brahms too.
In truth I don’t remember this particular concert well. I was familiar with the Dvorak and Brahms pieces but not the Lutoslawski one. I’m not sure I am much the wiser having heard it.
This was our one visit to the Proms that season away from the clutches of The Duchess. I had fallen into the habit of treating her to one ort wo Proms each season, by that time. Janie and I occasionally also went to something of our own choosing.
On this occasion, I think the programme looked unusual and yet approachable. Alexander Lazarev conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. I wanted to hear Francesca da Rimini performed live and Janie had acquired a taste for countertenor singing. Plus some unusual pieces.
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka – Capriccio brillante (on the Jota Aragonesa)
Sergey Prokofiev – Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor
Giya Kancheli – Symphony No. 3
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Francesca da Rimini
Alexander Glazunov – Raymonda, Op 57 No. 26 Grand pas espagnol Act 2- encore
Trad. – Eightsome (reel) – encore
What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing. Nothing went wrong. Although in truth, I don’t recall much about the lesser-known pieces and I cannot for the life of me work out where the countertenor fits in with this collection of pieces. Janie cemented her view that she didn’t like Prokofiev and that big symphony orchestra concerts were not really her favourite thing. Still, we both very much enjoyed our evening.
Here’s what the Glinka sounds like:
Here’s a good recording of the Prokofiev.
The Kancheli is strange yet certainly haunting:
I really enjoyed the Francesca da Rimini. Here is a more recent version of it from The Royal Festival Hall, but you’ll get the idea:
Dig this little bit of the Glazunov:
Fine composer, was Trad. Should have paired up with Anon – they could have been the Lennon and McCartney of the 11th to 19th centuries. Yet Janie insisted that the final encore was Trad’s “Tiresome Reel” rather than Eightsome Reel. I kinda see her point:
Geoffrey Norris in The Telegraph wrote very fondly of this Prom:
Rick Jones was less impressed in The Standard. I’m not quite sure what he means by an errrant electronic high-pitched note. Janie would argue that Prokofiev is meant to sound like that.
I think I have the programme somewhere but this was on my mystery list until I found it in both our diaries while doing one of my “25 years on” trawls.
This was a “birthday treat” for Janie in which I expect i picked up the tab and Pauline, Duchess of Castlebar, graced us with her presence.
Janie’s not much one for opera but we all agreed that Carmen was a good place to really test that hypothesis. I had “done” Carmen as a small child of course – type cast as an urchin boy – another story for another Ogblog.
Anyway…
…this was the Jonathan Miller production at the ENO.
Edward Seckerson in The Independent sort-of liked it:
I think we were fairly indifferent to the production. It certainly wasn’t as good as the Putney Operatic Society’s version 25 years earlier…I wasn’t in it for a start.
