7 replies to this topic

[leonid]

That extraordinary British event the BBC Promenade Concerts running from the 15th July to September 10 is underway with yesterday’s first night. My early encounter with this institution was encouraged by my trombone playing father. It was then broadcast by the old BBC Radio Third Programme. Later as a student I met lasting friends among the groups of noisy, but not uncouth young people who stood silently for several hours listening intently without any sense of tiring.

With every concert broadcast live on radio and made more popular with 25 concerts broadcast on television, it truly remains is a British institution listened to right across the UK.


For a list of concerts downloads are available at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms - as is the Daily Prom Guide giving information on a key composer and works each day.

http://www.guardian....lohlavek-review

[dirac]

Great links, leonid. Thank you. A tradition the BBC can be proud of.

[leonid]

Great links, leonid. Thank you. A tradition the BBC can be proud of.

Thank you.

With so much dumbing down on British television, it is a breath of fresh air and a welcome event for those that cannot attend in person.

[Pamela Moberg]

Great links, leonid. Thank you. A tradition the BBC can be proud of.

Thank you.

With so much dumbing down on British television, it is a breath of fresh air and a welcome event for those that cannot attend in person.

Feeling very nostalgic about this, thanks Leonid! When I lived in London, I lived just a few blocks away from Royal Albert Hall so I could go often. Coming out of the concert in those warm nights having taken part of those wonderful experiences - the music - the ambience - the warmth of the audience - those were memorable evenings and lovely memories
to be treasured for ever.

[Quiggin]

Drigo & Gergiev's Tchaikowski

from dirac's snippets:

The Telegraph

The Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre must have played Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake dozens or even hundreds of times, and there were occasions in this performance under Valery Gergiev when it sounded like it. While the orchestra clearly has the music in its blood, there was a touch of anaemia here that could have done with a shot of galvanising iron from the podium, especially in the first act.

Things did pick up after the interval, but there remained an underlying feeling that the orchestra was merely playing the ballet rather than working to recreate its atmosphere, its charm, its drama.

The Arts Desk

A fascinating experience, then. Gergiev is a strange being to head a ballet theatre: he conducts with his eyes determinedly shut, I think, stripping ballet scores of their choreographic varnish, which in most cases has left thick clots all over dansante pulses. It was a relief to hear certain waltzes handed their natural lilt and stitched naturally into their context, too fast for the iconic choreography to be performed to them in today's indulgently emphatic style (the rocking pas de trois of Act I, Odette's delicate Act II solo, Siegfried’s Act III solo).

I've listened to only first part of this performance, but the character is perhaps more Phil Spector than Yevgeny Mravinski. Rushing veils of sound and no time or space for the instruments to question and answer each other and to argue and scamper about. Valery Gergiev is not an intellectual conductor, it's all animal spirits and cumulative effect with him and sometimes it's right and sometimes not.

Available for audition in its entirety for a limited time:

Swan Lake at the Proms

[leonid]

Drigo & Gergiev's Tchaikowski

from dirac's snippets:

The Telegraph

The Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre must have played Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake dozens or even hundreds of times, and there were occasions in this performance under Valery Gergiev when it sounded like it. While the orchestra clearly has the music in its blood, there was a touch of anaemia here that could have done with a shot of galvanising iron from the podium, especially in the first act.

Things did pick up after the interval, but there remained an underlying feeling that the orchestra was merely playing the ballet rather than working to recreate its atmosphere, its charm, its drama.

The Arts Desk

A fascinating experience, then. Gergiev is a strange being to head a ballet theatre: he conducts with his eyes determinedly shut, I think, stripping ballet scores of their choreographic varnish, which in most cases has left thick clots all over dansante pulses. It was a relief to hear certain waltzes handed their natural lilt and stitched naturally into their context, too fast for the iconic choreography to be performed to them in today's indulgently emphatic style (the rocking pas de trois of Act I, Odette's delicate Act II solo, Siegfried’s Act III solo).

I've listened to only first part of this performance, but the character is perhaps more Phil Spector than Yevgeny Mravinski. Rushing veils of sound and no time or space for the instruments to question and answer each other and to argue and scamper about. Valery Gergiev is not an intellectual conductor, it's all animal spirits and cumulative effect with him and sometimes it's right and sometimes not.

Available for audition in its entirety for a limited time:

Swan Lake at the Proms

What I found curious for an orchestral concert, was that he did not conduct the original score but as reported a version of the later revisions with interpolations.

I think it was a missed opportunity which would have constituted a musical coup. But then perhaps not, as Gergiev was conducting.

As the orchestra had brought the revised score version with them for the performances given two weeks earlier by the Kirov/Maryinskii ballet and it was after all it was only a performance in London.

Why did the BBC see the potential and pick up on the opportunity?

[Quiggin]

Leonid-

What I found curious for an orchestral concert, was that he did not conduct the original score but as reported a version of the later revisions with interpolations.

Yes, and I didn't realize the extent of the revisions until I read David Brown's biography of Tschaikovsky.

Where Riccardo Drigo proposes, "...I knew of (Tchaikovsky's) dissatisfaction with the instrumentation of (Swan Lake), and that he intended to take up the matter, but he never managed to do this" & "...it was my lot, like a surgeon, to perform an operation on Swan Lake, and I feared that I might not grasp the individuality of the great Russian master," Brown counters:

Riccardo Drigo ... an infinitely less great composer ... meddled in the music, deleting some numbers, truncating others, changing their order and adding three piano pieces by Tchaikovsky which he orchestrated... In much of the score Tchaikovsky had composed his music specifically for certain dramatic passages or moments, and the resiting of these is always damaging and sometimes grossly inept...

&

As music for ballet, [the original] Swan Lake was, as a revolutionary conception, second only to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring nearly forty years later. No ballet score had ever contained such rhythmically complicated music ...

Yes, a lost opportunity ... but also because, at least to my taste, Gergiev doesn't let the music open up on its own, he pushes it ahead all the time, from the outside in.

[Rosa]

I thought the "32 Fouettes" program with Samantha Bond, Deborah Bull and Derek Jacobi during the interval of the Swan Lake Prom performance very interesting.