It's a big night at the Proms on 16 August: it's the Proms debut of yet another preternatural pianistic prodigy, Yuja Wang, who plays Bartok's Second Piano Concerto, and Andrew Litton makes a welcome appearance with the Royal Philharmonic performing Prokofiev's Fourth Symphony.
None of that matters though, next to what else is on the RPO's gigantic three-part programme. They start with Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man – a bracing little amuse-bouche – then comes a performance that should have anyone who cares about early 20th-century music, and British music in particular, feverish with anticipation: Arnold Bax's Second Symphony, which has had to wait more than eight decades to be played at the Royal Albert Hall.
However you hear the performance, in the hall or on the radio, I invite you to forget your preconceptions about a particular kind of early 20th-century British music, once derided as the musical equivalent of noxious bovine effluvia. If you've never heard a Bax symphony before, prepare to celebrate one of the marvels of early 20th-century orchestration in the symphony's opening few minutes, and bask in Bax's top tunes, his aching melancholy, and brilliant orchestral imagination in the rest of the symphony's three movements. You'll be in good historical company, too: the symphony was dedicated to Serge Koussevitzky, who premiered it in December 1929 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Imagine seeing Bax on a Boston Symphony programme today.
Tuesday's performance should be a longed-for vindication of a work that is a known winner with the public, but which I have never seen programmed in a live concert by any of our professional orchestras in a lifetime of going to concerts. The paradox is that thousands of people buy Bax's music on disc – there have been three complete cycles of his seven symphonies in recent times, all of them excellent, from Vernon Handley, David Lloyd-Jones, and Bryden Thomson, as well as the first ever survey released by Lyrita in the LP era. Yet cowardly orchestral managers and programmers are petrified of actually giving the music the space it deserves in the concert hall. Thank goodness for the Proms beginning to put things right for Bax, Frank Bridge, Havergal Brian, and other British composers. I'll say it again: leave your prejudices behind and approach Bax's symphony with open ears. Whatever you make of it, it should be a musical experience you won't forget.
