The penultimate week of the Proms witnessed the festival's ugliest moments, with the noisy disruption last Thursday of the Israel Philharmonic's concert. But the same week also saw what is perhaps the best ever comment below the line of the Guardian's classical reviews. I'm a stickler for the good news then bad news format – an uncommon failing among journalists, I know – so I'll begin with the comment, which appeared beneath Tim Ashley's review of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, conducted by the venerable Colin Davis.
"Sir Colin first came to our attention", wrote petertheteacher, "standing in for Otto Klemperer at the Royal Festival Hall over 50 years ago if memory serves me right. I well remember Klemperer's triumphing over profound frailty in those latter years. Sir Colin's performance has echoes of that same granite-like obstinacy, that refusal to admit the passing of years – keep going!!"
The image of "granite-like obstinacy" found favour with other commenters, Tim himself among them, but what caught my eye was the sheer breadth of comparison uncovered so naturally in the phrase "Sir Colin first came to our attention standing in for Otto Klemperer". One often speed-reads on the internet, but after such a phrase, you breathe, and read again.
The link between Davis and "Klemperian inevitability" was also made on the Boulezian blog, whose author looked forward to when he might "look back in my dotage – assuming that I shall have one – and remember Sir Colin Davis conducting the Missa Solemnis at the Proms." Advice for the author is readily at hand. Keep going! On the ArtsDesk, meanwhile, Alexandra Coghlan drew a more contemporaneous strand from the performance, arguing that "with the anniversary of 9/11 approaching and events in Libya daily coloured with further details of horror, Beethoven's Mass – military echoes of war never long absent – has a topical urgency that wasn't lost in Davis's closing."
Beethovenian topical urgency was certainly flavour of the month for the select band of anti-Israel protesters whose interruptions – which included a rather raucous rendition of Beethoven's Ode to Joy – forced Radio 3's controllers to take Thursday night's Prom off the air. One must respect their right to protest of course, but it is difficult to respect the manner of it: disrupting cultural events in this way tends to smack less of free speech and more of the desire to suppress it.
The Guardian's Erica Jeal did her best to look on the bright side. "Would Gil Shaham have played so forcefully in other circumstances?" she asked. No, said remo55, who would nonetheless have preferred a concert "with no such need of 'push'… Ultimately", he concluded, "I believe that art and politics really ought not to mix." But ReinerTorheit1791, who would rather Shaham, Mehta et al hadn't played anything at all, forcefully or otherwise, was adamant that art and politics should indeed mix, advising anyone of the contrary opinion to "stick to Smooth Classics. I'd hate you to get a rude awakening if you went to anything like FIDELIO, TOSCA, or FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD".
The comments section of Guardian reviews is a capacious and capricious forum, but Steven Isserlis evidently felt it was either not capacious enough, or too capricious, for his own admonishment to the protestors. They, he argued in a letter to the newspaper, "are not only guilty of cultural hooliganism, but are deeply misguided". "I have played many times with the orchestra", he continued. "There are a wide range of political opinions within the group, and their attitudes seldom coincide with those over here who condemn Israel at a safe remove from any threat to their own lives."
But safe removes can be illusory. This seems to have been the view of one of the protesters, Tony Greenstein, who contributed a second letter: "Who would now say that it would have been wrong to mix politics and culture and disrupt the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra … when they toured in the 1930s?"
A good question, but then art and politics always was a difficult cocktail to mix, and it would take more than a blogpost to determine the proper proportions (if asked, though, I'd suggest mirroring Churchill's famous indications about gin and vermouth, respectively). "But how was the music?", you ask. Meh, thought the Telegraph's Ivan Hewett, whose poor view of some of the season's least adventurous programming gave the "overriding impression of an opportunity wasted". Wasted by some, milked by others? Not entirely dissimilar to the Oslo accords, then.
