The BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s third appearance at the Proms so far this summer launched the season’s tribute to Hubert Parry, marking the centenary of his death. Conducted by Martyn Brabbins, it placed Parry’s works alongside music by two composers, Vaughan Williams and Holst, who owed him a considerable debt, though not a direct, stylistic one.
Parry’s works were rooted in the 19th-century mainstream, in the Victorian choral tradition and the symphonies of Schumann and Brahms. His reputation now rests on a handful of choral works – particularly his setting of Blake’s Jerusalem, which is such a staple of Proms Last Nights – but he also had a sizeable orchestral output, including five symphonies. The last of those began Brabbins’ programme.
Subtitled “symphonic fantasia 1912”, Parry’s Fifth compresses traditional four-movement form into a single, 25-minute span, tightly bound together thematically. The music seems mostly ruminative; only a wispy, Mendelssohnian scherzo supplies real contrast. There are some glorious, almost Elgarian moments, especially in the slow movement, but the final affirmative climax seems contrived, as if, at the last moment, the composer’s nerve failed and he could not write the more ambiguous ending the symphony seems to require.
There was choral Parry in the concert too. Hear My Words, Ye People, with soprano and baritone soloists (Francesca Chiejina and Ashley Riches) as well as chorus (the BBC National Chorus of Wales), organ (Adrian Partington) and brass, inevitably recalled Delius’s waspish observation that Parry would have set the whole of the Bible to music had he lived long enough. And there were memories of school assemblies, as well, in its final, implausibly jaunty setting of the hymn “O Praise ye the Lord”.
Brabbins certainly gave both works all the care and attention they needed, but he and the orchestra seemed much more comfortable in the rest of the programme. Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, with Tai Murray as the soloist, may have been a bit routine, but his Pastoral Symphony was unfolded with marvellously unforced authority by Brabbins. And the real discovery of the evening came with Holst’s Ode to Death, a magically subtle choral setting of Whitman, composed at the end of the first world war, which manages to be both elegiac and consolatory.
•Available on BBC iPlayer.
•The Proms continue until 8 September.
