It's the story of the Proms season so far: and it's not just Thomas Adès. New music is packing out the Proms. Either that, or it's some clever programming: so far, there have been full, 6,000-strong houses for Messiaen's Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, Tevot, and perhaps even more amazingly, Monday night's Elliott Carter, his Oboe Concerto (good houses, too, for Simon Holt's world premiere on Friday, and respectable even for the rarity of Messiaen's La Transfiguration). Admittedly, the Carter was the filling in a Beethoven sandwich, but for once, it didn't feel like some unpleasant roughage before the main course of the Fifth Symphony. Instead, soloist Nicholas Daniel and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Robertson, made this magnificently lyrical, impassioned music sound perfectly intelligible, and intelligibly perfect within the context of the programme - and more beguiling than the Grosse Fuge that kicked off the concert.
The final three notes are probably the most terrifyingly vertiginous ever written for the oboe: the soloist has to plunge from the very top of the instrument to its lowest note (the B flat below middle C), but connect them as a single, singing line, before a final C sharp hat has to be in tune with a tam-tam. Hear and see how Nicholas Daniel mastered it here. Maybe it's Carter's astonishing longevity and vitality, and the fact that he will celebrate his 100th birthday in December (he's also, by the way, writing more music now than he ever has). Whatever the reason, Nicholas Daniel was telling me that his music is selling out huge halls all over the world. This is the fifth time he's played the Carter concerto this year, having performed it in repeated all-Carter programmes in Madrid and Saint Louis to full houses. People, finally, are getting Carter.
