Three Proms, One Play
I: Chineke and Angel Blue in American music; Dvořák Saturday 22 August
At this season of BBC Proms, American music has been a running theme, in celebration of this 250th anniversary of the United States of America. Both American compositions and American musicians are playing their part; and everyone can forget President Trump while the music plays.
On Saturday 22, the American soprano Angel Blue, conductor Jonathan Hayward, and the Chineke Orchestra gave us Samuel Barber’s song-cycle “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” followed by a group of classic songs by Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, and Berlin. Too bad that the Albert Hall (as on other recent concerts with vocal music) failed to project the song-cycle’s words, which are by James Agee, who was born in Knoxville, Tennessee): he evoked Knoxville and a bygone provincial idyll in the words excerpted by Barber, his close contemporary. (The song cycle was commissioned by the great - and greatly versatile - soprano Eleanor Steber, one of several singers who have recorded it.) Angel Blue sang an admirable Aida at Covent Garden in 2023; on this occasion, some of her words - too few - were audible, but she performed with grace and charm. You could feel the challenge that the prom occasion posed for her - and you could see how happily she gained in confidence as song followed song.
“Chineke” means “God”. The Chineke Orchestra, founded in 2015 and the first professional orchestra in Europe to be made up of majority Black and ethnically diverse musicians, is exemplary for its largeness of spirit - no pettiness or inhibitions here. After the interval, it turned back to Europe for Dvořák’s wonderfully lyrical and intensely Bohemian Eighth Symphony. I know people who underrate this orchestra: it is their loss.
The concert had opened with the world premiere of Tuffus Zimbabwe’s reconstruction and arrangement of Edmund Thornton Jenkins’s agreeable “Dance Suite”, music written in 1918. The African American Jenkins (1894-1926) spent much of his short career in Europe, winning prizes as a student at London’s Royal Academy of Music. On this evidence, he wasn’t historically important as a composer, but he remains good company: I want to know whether, by writing ballet music in 1918, he was inspired by the modernism of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes or whether he had something more modest in mind. Though his music is not radically modernist, it’s confidently of its moment.
II: A Slow Fire - Jermyn St Theatre - Tuesday 25
For those of you who have been longing for a post-apocalyptic play set in a bunker, it’s possible that Simon Stephens’s “A Slow Fire” is the play you have been waiting for, possible but not probable. Though the prolific Anglo-Irish Stephens, now in his mid-fifties, has been writing good plays since the last century, this one feels undercooked.
It starts and ends with two Irishmen, Ashton (Ross Gaynor) and Reece (Fionn Ó Loinsigh), talking to each other. We soon learn that they’re cut off from society, and that they like to play-act real scenes from their past lives, as well as scenes that they like to imagine might happen to them. They direct and review each other’s performances, too. Things get all the more interestingly peculiar when one of them acts out being pregnant. (This between men whose sexuality never seems seriously homo-.) Bit by bit, we learn that the outer world has somehow changed out of recognition: characters speak of walking from Kleine Dover, of Alaska Beach, and of Paris Beach. (I call the characters Irish because of their accents, but the play doesn’t label them.) Reece and Ashton seem marooned in an enforced “Godot” symbiosis.
Yet, while the play’s tantalising mysteries grow more complex, they don’t deepen it. Stephens, and director Rex Ryan, seldom help us to understand how often the characters are play-acting - the play text suggests far more often than I realised when watching. Reece and Ashton mainly speak in loud and unrelaxed voices - louder than is comfortable for the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre - that create a tension beyond any explained by the play. Two other characters enter, which certainly gives further layers to the plot, but without advancing its inner drama.
III: The N.Y. Met Orchestra - Richard Strauss - Wednesday 26
The exuberant Yannick Nézet-Séguin became music director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera in time for its 2020-2021 season, after more than ten years of guest appearances with it (including time as its music director designate). Though the Met orchestra has often given concerts independent of its opera house, it’s still a surprise to find these players here - a surprise both happy and exciting. Nézet-Séguin is a dynamo: you can see and feel how infectious his personal energy - generous, sensitive, intelligent - becomes for them.
Wednesday’s concert was all Richard Strauss: a triple bill of a long suite from “Der Rosenkavalier” (not an opera he has conducted at the Met, and a quite different suite from the one often played across Lincoln Center Plaza by New York City Ballet for George Balanchine’s “Vienna Waltzes”), of the heroine’s necrophiliac final scene from “Salome” (with Elza van den Heever in the title role), and the tone poem “Ein Heldenleben”. It’s famous that Strauss, in an endearingly self-deprecating statement, said in 1947 “I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer”. Generally I agree with that - there are scores in which he’s not even first-class at being second-rate (“The Legend of Joseph”, for example) - but plenty of his music is a guilty pleasure of mine: so engaging that I’m happy to be engaged by it when it’s well conducted and played and sung - as on this occasion.
Nézet-Séguin seems a natural Straussian: he relishes this music’s complexity, its sensuousness, and its contrasts. He cast his greatest spell towards the concert’s end, as the long Nietzsche-inspired “Ein Heldenleben” drew into a beautiful and unusual duet for solo violin and principal horn - unusual because the two voices continue together without sharing the same material or even seeming to respond to each other: they calmly and beautifully co-exist in serene independence.
The South African soprano Van den Heever (as tall as Nézet-Séguin is short; formerly a mezzosoprano; and on this occasion looking splendid in a one-shoulder fuchsia gown) is not well known in the U.K. - she has sung with English National Opera, but not of late. But she’s gradually become one of the Met’s most daring and forceful dramatic artists, visibly a woman of purpose and mettle across a wide repertory from Donizetti to Wagner. Her voice doesn’t have a wide range of colour, she plants words less consistently than I enjoy, she enters her top notes as if separating them from the music’s flow; and yet she’s still a winning artist. She spits the word “Scharlachnatter” (scarlet viper) with singular venom: she swings her way through Salome’s self-contradictions with vehement attack. At the end of the concert, Nézet-Séguin brought her back to sing Strauss’s “Zueignung”: she cracked up and stopped the first time after having muddled her words. But the warm cheerfulness of her performance - fluent the second time - made this all the happier.
IV: The Met Orchestra - Mahler - Thursday 27
The late composer Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) had a wide range. I’m still not converted to all the music of hers I’ve heard (I had big problems with her 2022 opera “Innocence”, sung in five languages, though it has been warmly acclaimed by many others), but she’s been the composer for two of the most poetically gorgeous works of music theatre in recent years - the opera “L’Amour de loin” (2000), as given at the Met in Robert Lepage’s 2016 production and Pam Tanowitz’s full-length dance creation “Four Quartets” (2019). The Met orchestra and Nézet-Séguin commemorated her by opening Thursday’s concert with her “Lumière et Pésanteur” (2009, Light and Gravity): short, rich, layered, yummy.
Otherwise this was a Mahler evening. Opinions differ as to whether Mahler wrote an opera or not - it all depends on how you count “Der Drei Pintos”, a Weber comedy that Mahler completed for an 1888 premiere in Leipzig - but generally we think of opera as a genre that Mahler conducted rather than composed, to such an extent that some of us listen to ancient recordings by Anna Bahr-Mildenburg (only one, but quite something) and Johanna Gadski (many, among which her Mozart Donna Elvira may have been shaped by Mahler) - hoping to glean traces of his influence upon their performances.
This Mahler concert was a double-bill of the orchestral version of the five Rũckert lieder and the Fourth Symphony. The American mezzosoprano Joyce DiDonato, fairly well known in Britain, sang both: usually the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth is given to a radiant soprano, but DiDonato (who has some impressive mezzo predecessors in this music) made it her own, applying a range of colour that keenly differentiated each song: she made the five a large journey of the spirit.
Nézet-Séguin shaped the Fourth Symphony like a Romantic enthusiast, driving some passages fast while lingering lovingly over others. The Met orchestra, individual players relishing all their solo opportunies all the more evidently away from the pit, horn and flute not least. Benjamin Bowman, concert-master, played solo violin with exceptional eloquence. (I remember his marvellous account of Bernstein’s “Symposium after Plato’s Symposium” with American Ballet Theatre the years ago.)
Some singers only join the orchestra during the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth, but DiDonato took her place in the back of the orchestra well before the symphony began. It happened that my view of her was literally through the Met’s harp, which framed her theatrically (“she looks like a Greek goddess,” said a friend). She then stepped forth from the frame when she rose to sing the last movement - which refers to angels and which leads to the return of the harp, which closes the symphony.
DiDonato brightened her voice to achieve the music’s innocent rapture, while using her chest tones to give a sturdy forthrightness to the lower notes. Years ago, I was discussing DiDonato’s shortcomings - her vibrato has sometimes intruded on her line and her vowels have sometimes been compromised - with another singer, when he cut me off by simply saying “But she’s wonderful, isn’t she?” He was right: as Michael Scott wrote of Lotte Lehmann, to complain of her faults is to complain that the Venus de Milo has no arms. DiDonato, though one of the most remarkable word-painters before the public today, never over-calculates her effects. I think of her as one of the great performing artists of our day.
@Alastair Macaulay, 2026