The 2015 BBC Proms come to an end on Saturday with the usual Last Night rituals, bells and whistles. But as well as the traditional numbers, in recent years there has usually been a world premiere of a work specially commissioned for the occasion. This time it’s going to be Arise Athena! by Eleanor Alberga. Whether it’s a modest concert opener like Alberga’s piece or something altogether more demanding and abrasive, it’s a timely reminder that new music has been a part of the Proms’ programming since they began in 1895, long before the BBC was ever thought of.
Here, then, is my selection of some of the most significant pieces to have been performed in public for the first time at the Proms.
1912: Schoenberg – Five Orchestral Pieces
When his Queen’s Hall Orchestra were struggling with the technical challenges of Schoenberg’s score during rehearsals, Henry Wood urged them to persevere with the words: “Stick to it gentlemen – this is nothing to what you will have to play in 25 years’ time!” Wood had insisted on including at least one concert of new music in every Proms season since the very first, though nothing quite as radical as Schoenberg’s expressionism had been heard there before.
1912: Bridge – The Sea
Three weeks after the Schoenberg, Wood also introduced this symphonic suite. Frank Bridge had previously been thought of as primarily a miniaturist, but the premiere established him as a composer of large-scale orchestral works, and despite the originality and modernism of some of his later music, The Sea has remained his most performed orchestral score. In 1924, it made a deep impression on the 10-year-old Benjamin Britten, and four years later Bridge agreed to take Britten as the only composition pupil he ever had.
1929: Walton – Viola Concerto
Walton composed what was his first major orchestral work for the great British viola virtuoso Lionel Tertis. When the work was completed, though, Tertis rejected it, and the first performance was eventually given by Paul Hindemith as the soloist, with Walton himself conducting. It’s arguably the greatest of all Walton’s orchestral works, and Tertis subsequently recognised his mistake and performed it a number of times.
1938: Britten – Piano Concerto
Perhaps because purely orchestral works are relatively scarce in his later output, surprisingly few pieces by Britten were heard for the first time at the Proms. But the Piano Concerto was one exception. Britten was the soloist in the premiere, but he was never entirely happy with the work – perhaps he thought its debt to Prokofiev was a bit too obvious – and he revised it seven years later. Even then, however, it didn’t really gain much currency until Sviatolsav Richter took it up and recorded it in 1970, with Britten now as the conductor.
1943: Vaughan Williams – Symphony No 5
Vaughan Williams spent more than 40 years wrestling with the idea of making an opera out of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The work finally reached the stage in 1951, but before that audiences had been allowed a sample of its rapt contemplative world in the Fifth Symphony, which derives most of its material from the opera, and which Vaughan Williams dedicated to Sibelius.
1964: Mahler – Symphony No 10 (performing version by Deryck Cooke)
The history of Mahler’s final, unfinished symphony, and musicologist Deryck Cooke’s part in finally bringing the full score to performance, has been told many times. As early as 1960 the composer-conductor and former Schoenberg pupil Berthold Goldschmidt had conducted a BBC studio broadcast of a preliminary version of Cooke’s work, but it was another four years before all five movements reached the concert hall, conducted again by Goldschmidt, and the full magnificence of Mahler’s last musical testament and of Cooke’s realisation of it could finally be appreciated.
1969: Maxwell Davies – Worldes Blis
The uproar that greeted the premiere of Birtwistle’s Panic had been prefigured 26 years earlier with the premiere of his friend and Manchester contemporary’s massive motet for orchestra based on the medieval song of the same name, which drove many of the audience noisily out of the hall during the performance. It was the climax, and arguably the greatest achievement, of Peter Maxwell Davies’s expressionist years, a 40-minute, single movement of Mahlerian power that grinds remorselessly to a huge climax when the medieval source is finally revealed in sonorous glory. It’s a work that ought to be heard nowadays far more often than it is.
1977: Berio – Coro (revised version)
An earlier version of Berio’s exuberantly lyrical celebration for 40 voices and 40 instrumentalists of the age-old traditions of singing had been heard at the Donaueschingen festival in 1976, but Berio substantially changed his score for the Prom that he conducted the following year. It was to remain one of his most exhilarating and perfectly achieved scores, encapsulating everything that made the Italian one of the most distinctive and humane voices among the composers of the post-1945 European avant garde.
1989: Tavener – The Protecting Veil
Though John Tavener seems likely to be best remembered for his choral music, it was actually this work for cello and orchestra, composed for Steven Isserlis, who was the soloist in the Albert Hall premiere, first gave him an international profile. A meditation on a series of eight icons of the Virgin Mary, it effectively transfers the subject matter of so much of Tavener’s choral music to an instrumental context, and does so with great power and immediacy.
1995: Harrison Birtwistle – Panic
No one can be really sure whether the late John Drummond, in his last season as the director of the Proms, deliberately included Birtwistle’s raw-edged, aggressive “dithyramb” for saxophone, percussion and chamber orchestra in the Last Night programme just for its shock value. Whether deliberate provocation or not, it did the trick, and the evening went down in Proms history, while the piece itself took its proper place in the series of works for solo instrument and orchestra that Birtwsitle has produced over the last 30 years.
