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.
Anton Bruckner – Symphony No. 8 in C minor (1890 version, ed. Nowak)
My log note describes “Brucknergate” as follws:
It was meant to be a different programme, but Gunter changed it.
Well, I suppose Günter was a Bruckner specialist and I quite often booked to see him conduct Bruckner’s works anyway.
Mercifully, The Duchess (Janie’s mum, Pauline) seemed to accept the change with grace at that time. She possibly felt that the change meant that she had dodged a bullet in the matter of procuring interval drinks, as there was no interval given that it was a one piece concert. Pauline’s idea of a fair deal was for me or Janie to buy the tickets, the other of me or Janie to buy the dinner and she would buy the interval drinks…
…unless we were at The Questors Theatre, where she was a member, in which case she would do the theatre tickets, while Janie and I would procure the drinks and meal. (The Duchess received a few free guest tickets each year as part of her membership package, we later discovered.)
But I digress.
Strangely, I have found a recording of this very concert on YouTube, which I can share with you right here:
According to the accompanying verbiage, this concert turned out to be Günter Wand’s last stand…in the matter of conducting BBC Proms.
Rick Jones waxed lyrical about this concert in his trio of Standard Proms reviews:
Martin Kettle in The Guardian compared this Wand performance of Bruckner 8 with previous ones a little unfavourably while still praising the performance. A case of “the Kettle calling the Wand slack” or something like that:
In the end, I suppose I should be glad to have been there for this one. I had been following Günter Wand around the Proms for best part of a decade by then.
Janie’s first encounter with Günter, was this. Possibly Pauline’s too, although she “will have done all that” with Janie’s father decades earlier, no doubt.
Günter Wand had a close working relationship with the BBC Symphony Orchestra for the Proms for a long time.
To the Royal Festival Hall in deep midwinter with Bobbie, as part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra 60th Anniversary festival. We went to a couple of these concerts; this was the second of them.
Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich waved the stick and David Butt played the flute. We heard three great works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
Symphony No 39 in E Flat Major
Flute Concerto in G Major, K313/KE285c
Symphony No 40 in G Minor, K550
I’m not sure this was a perfect fit of conductor and orchestra for these works, but it was lovely to hear these familiar pieces in the Royal Festival Hall. I cannot find any newspaper archive reviews for this one, so my one-line review based on a memory of an event from nearly 34 years ago (as I write) will have to do.
Bobbie and I went to a couple of Friday evening concerts at The Royal Festival Hall as part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s 60th Anniversary festival.
We were supposed to see the great Günter Wand performing a couple of Beethoven Symphonies, but Günter pulled out at the last minute so Andrew Davis decided to shake a stick at one of Günter’s signature pieces:
Anton Bruckner – Symphony No 8 in C Minor.
Hence, a one piece concert, this.
I did subsequently get to hear and see Günter perform this piece with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at what turned out to be his last BBC Prom hurrah – another occasion when we turned up to hear one set of pieces and got Bruckner 8 instead.
It’s just as well that I like Bruckner 8. I guess I have become mighty familiar with it over the years, collecting four Bruckner 8’s in 10 years between 1989 and 1999.
Malcolm Hayes in The Telegraph was unsure about this brave (but in his view, flawed) 1991 attempt:
Annalisa was due to join me at this concert, but had to pull out at the last minute for some reason. The reason is not captured in my log. It was a Sunday, so I expect it was a health reason rather than a work reason.
Anyway, I hobbled to the Albert Hall alone for this Prom. I think it was the first time I had been to the Proms alone and possibly was the only time I have done so to date (the date of writing this being late 2024).
I say hobbled, because the cursory “traction” approach to my multiple prolapse was obviously not working and I was still in a great deal of pain with my back after my injury in June that year. Indeed, I associate my evening alone at the Proms with Anton & Günter as the point at which I resolved that I would have to try something else, but that I was determined to try something other than major surgery before possibly submitting to that as a last resort.
This was a one piece concert:
Anton Bruckner – Symphony No 5 in B Flat Major, performed by the maestro Günter Wand conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
I suspect that Bruckner 5 is a good number for contemplative thought – it is certainly long enough. I do remember finding this performance especially moving and being really taken with it.
It was filmed and the film has been released on DVD – here is an extract:
If you look very carefully you might spot me sitting in the stalls on my tod.
There are some crossings out in my diary, which might have led to the note:
?? Who came with me.
Again, lining up the usual suspects means Jilly, Annalisa and Bobbie. Again, the prime suspect is Bobbie. I think I had queried the name of my companion, because I thought I had crossed out the word “Bobs?”. But my now more sophisticated forensics (use of a magnifying glass) tells me that I crossed out the word “Box?” instead.
Whether or not we sat in a box for this one is another part of the mystery. I do recall occasionally grabbing a brace of box seats back then, although I did soon settle for preferring frontish stalls for Proms concerts.
Anyway…
…this one was a good, solid concert as I recall. We heard:
Carl Nielsen – Overture ‘Helios’
Sergey Rachmaninov – Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor
Jean Sibelius – Symphony No. 2 in D major
Stephen Hough tinkling the ivories, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Davis doing the rest.
If you don’t know what the Helios overture looks and sounds like, dig this version by the Danish National Orchestra:
Malcolm Hayes in The Telegraph spent about 60% of his word allocation slagging off perceived compositional flaws in Nielsen’s little Helios piece, while praising to the hilt the evening’s performances of monumental Rachmaninov and Sibelius pieces, which comprised some 85% of the concert. A wasted opportunity to write an incisive review of the Prom by Mr Hayes, in my view.
Tadaaki Jones Standard 01 Sep 1997, Mon Evening Standard (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
