In 1895, when Henry Wood and Robert Newman founded the Proms, their idea was not to give the people what they want but to expand people’s tastes, creating an audience and educating it almost by stealth.
Now, the announcement of the Proms programme each spring is always predictably followed by spluttering about the inclusion of a Dr Who/Strictly/Stax Prom – as if the Berlin Phil are going to refuse to come later in the season because somebody’s spotted a Dalek in the arena. You can argue all day about whether, by demystifying the idea of a classical music festival, these events succeed in drawing in an audience that might one day return for a straight-up concert. But it’s clear the Proms once again takes seriously its role as educator – or at least it was clear at the weekend, when the Aurora Orchestra’s lecture-concert taking apart Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was followed by two performances of the Ten Pieces Prom. Incidentally, Saturday also saw three Water Music proms in Hull, the festival’s first official visit to a city outside London.
The Aurora Orchestra’s USP, apart from youth, is that they often play from memory. And, as they didn’t need to read the notes to play their Beethoven, they could move around the stage and provide snippets of music to illustrate the talk their conductor Nicholas Collon presented with Tom Service during the first half hour. The movement and the playing were slickly done – as they filed up and across and down the steps on stage into their next formation, it looked like a giant human game of Snake. The chat itself – lecture is too formal – was polished, too, and pacy; and without getting too bogged down in music-speak, Collon and Service made some effective points about the ways Beethoven subverts our expectations. The more they looked at the piece, the more it seemed there was to see.
They started with the finale, and finished with the slow movement – and here, the players demonstrated how closely Strauss quoted from the Eroica in his Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings, by superimposing a phrase of the latter on the former. Then came the “real” performances: first Metamorphosen, played with soloistic flair in an attempt to make this elegiac piece fill the huge hall; then the Beethoven itself, with the episodes that had earlier been picked apart whizzing past us at speed. Did the Beethoven sound different for being played from memory? Not very – and yet perhaps the musicians were shaping longer, more complete phrases, because all that mattered was what was in their ears rather than what was on the page.
There was lots more speech the next day, and given that this hall isn’t acoustically kind to the spoken word you had to be attentive. This time, the words were aimed at a younger audience. The BBC’s Ten Pieces scheme, offering inspiration and resources for school music lessons, is now on its second Prom. This was styled as “Sir Henry’s Magnificent Musical Inspirations”, and starred a prodigiously bearded Rory Kinnear as Henry Wood, summoned from the past to introduce the music via an entertaining if slightly forced script, and to do battle with Mozart’s villain from The Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night. Soprano Kathryn Lewek had fun with the latter, crowning earlier on-screen appearances as acid as those of a Disney baddie with an eventual arrival on stage to deliver a blistering Der Hölle Rache.
Other highlights of the afternoon performance included Jess Gillam’s soaring soprano saxophone in Peter Sculthorpe’s Island Songs; the excellent teenage choir in Elgar and Vivaldi; sitar playing from Gaurav Mazumdar on a little-known but gorgeous 1918 piece by Lili Boulanger, D’un matin de printemps; and the first performance of No Place Like, a stomping a cappella choral piece by Kerry Andrew, made up of sounds children associate with home, from doorbells to sirens to football chants. The Royal Philharmonic, who worked hard for conductor Jessica Cottis, were comprehensively upstaged during Mussorgsky’s Gnomus by the enormous puppet goblin stalking through the arena.
Malcolm Sargent, chief conductor of the Proms for nearly two decades, was more an entertainer than an educator, but he understood the potential reach of the festival perhaps better than anyone. On Monday night, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Andrew Davis recreated Sargent’s 500th Prom, from the first night of the 1966 season, to mark the half century since his death. Sargent championed British music, and Holst, Elgar, Walton, Delius and Britten were all represented; but listening on the radio – the way most of the Proms audience listens – the highlight was Schumann’s Piano Concerto. Enjoying Beatrice Rana’s impassioned playing in this, and in her lushly romantic encore – Liszt’s arrangement of Widmung – required no education at all.
• The BBC Proms continue until 9 September.
