Tuesday’s mammoth Proms concert saw all five of Prokofiev’s performed in a single night. The London Symphony Orchestra’s three-soloist, five-work, single-evening marathon has made me wonder about the other stamina-testing and virtuosity-pushing live box-sets we could dream up and put on at the Royal Albert Hall. The obvious ones are Beethoven’s nine symphonies in a single day, and Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 24 hours, but those have both been done (although never at the Proms in such a short space of time) and are mere foothills compared to the mountain ranges of potential musical cycles out there. Classical music completists of the world, unite!
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Klang
Stockhausen’s Klang – Sound – cycle would have been a sequence of 24 pieces representing each hour of the day. He died with only three “hours” missing (the vast majority of the piece are shorter than a clock-hour). A performance of Stockhausen’s almost-complete day of sound would be one of the most compelling and all-encompassing musical journeys you could experience, from electronic music to works for two harps, from solo piano music to vocal works, from the first hour, Ascension to the 21st, Paradise.
Arnold Bax: seven symphonies
Bax’s symphonies are some of the most distinctive, craggy, hyper-Romantic gems of early 20th-century music. Both the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the BBC Philharmonic have recorded complete cycles on disc: what we need is a double-orchestra Baxathon, which would take us on an epically exciting symphonic odyssey that would open our collective imaginations and resurrect Bax’s symphonic reputation.
Nikolai Myaskovsky: complete symphonies – all 27 of them
Some 20 hours of music, so easily doable in a day, and surely Valery Gergiev would be up to the challenge of performing them all back-to-back, in what would be an immersive revelation of one of the 20th century’s most significant, and most underrated, symphonists.
Jean Sibelius: the complete tone-poems
It’s not just about symphonies: in the year of the 150th anniversary of his birth, what we need is Sibelius’s complete tone-poems in a single concert. It’s a mere six-and-a-half hours of music, which would create a dark world of myth, magic, and mystery as a single Finnish orchestra – let’s go for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, and a stellar line-up of Finnish conductors such as Osmo Vänskä, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sakari Oramo and Susanna Mälkki – could push themselves to their Sibelian limits.
Alexander Scriabin: complete symphonies, orchestral works, and Preparation for the Final Mystery
This project is simultaneously easier to realise, because it’s a mere few hours long, and the most ambitious of the lot. The centenary of Scriabin’s death has been scandalously neglected by many of classical music’s institutions, IMHO; and the best way to rectify that situation would be to go through a day of all of his symphonic music, as well as the surreally powerful Preparation for the Final Mystery, which the composer Alexander Nemtin made from Scriabin’s sketches for the musical apocalypse project he dreamed of at the end of his life (it’s around three hours of music, and this is only the prologue). That really would be an experience that might just change the world; or at least turn the Royal Albert Hall into an awe-inspiring crucible of apocalyptic imagination.
