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Commissioned for the opening concert of the 2025 BBC Proms, Errollyn Wallen’s The Elements is an exuberant piece welcoming to a broad audience not necessarily predisposed to classical, let alone contemporary, music. According to Wallen, the piece was partly inspired by her experience of playing alongside the bassist Steve Lewinson of Simply Red and is a celebration of “the fundamentals of music: life and love”.
Presumably intended as an audience-friendly outburst of joy, it doesn’t pretend to anything much more.
An ideal way to open the first concert of the season then? Except that it didn’t. It opened the second half, preceding Vaughan Williams’ solemn choral work Sancta Civitas. It’s difficult to understand why it was thought to be a good idea to juxtapose these two works, except on the principle of antithetical contrast, though the rare opportunity to hear the Vaughan Williams was one to be thankful for. With its large orchestra and massed choral forces – here the excellent BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus prepared by Neil Ferris, together with the voices of offstage members of London Youth Choirs floating down from celestial heights along with a solo trumpet – Sancta Civitas might almost have been written for the Albert Hall, whose cavernous spaces gave the music all the room it needed to breathe.
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The text is mostly from the Book of Revelation and the ethos is highly spiritual. I’m not sure how much of the detail could have been picked up by audience members without programmes. But the rarefied sense of it was well transmitted by the singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo’s empathetic baton. Gerald Finley was the expressive baritone soloist. But the show was stolen by the tenor Caspar Singh materialising next to the organ console for the briefest of solos right at the end. “Behold I come quickly”, he sang, and very beautifully. He went quickly too: after forty seconds by my count. Nice work if you can get it. I just hope, for his sake, his fee wasn’t pro rata.
The concert’s opener was in fact a fine fanfare written for Sir Henry Wood, the first conductor of the Promenade Concerts, in 1944 by Arthur Bliss, scored for three trumpets, three trombones and timpani. Then came two staples of the concert repertory: Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave overture, its ruminative qualities sensitively captured by Oramo, and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, imaginatively interpreted by Lisa Batiashvili. With its long introspective passages, the latter is not an easy work to project in this space. But Batiashvili held her audience spellbound, while delivering the virtuoso sections with aplomb.
