Proms; ballet school; recital; more Proms

I: The First Night of the Albert Hall Proms

The BBC Proms, one of the cultural mainstays of British life, began its 2026 season on Friday 17 July. Because this year  is the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the United States of America, the 2026 Proms season contains contributions by many American musicians. So this year’s season opened with Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” (1942), and proceeded to George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” (1928), with conductor Dalia Stasevska conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. 

A concert of all-American music would surely have been fine, but that was not for this strangely ordered programme. After those, all Friday 17’s fare had been composed on this side of the Atlanticby British and French composers. Ravel’s piano concerto in G major (1929-1931); then the world premiere of “That the sunrise leave us not unmoved”, a choral work by French-British composer Geraldine Stephenson; and, finally, Gerald Finzi’s ceremonial ode “For St Cecilia” (1946-1947), for tenor, choir, and orchestra. It may be said that the Ravel concerto, with its strong element of jazz, certainly reflected Europe’s musical debt to America; and Stephenson’s “That the sunset” was to a beautiful collage of words by the American poet Emily Dickinson. Some American connection would have been maintained had the concert ended with Britten’s “Hymn to St Cecilia” (1942), to words by W.H.Auden, much of which was composed during Britten’s period in America. But no: Finzi’s Cecilia work, from the same decade, is terminally English.

On Friday 17, the Copland certainly made an impression, but the Gershwin on this occasion felt diffuse, lightweight. The concert’s highlight followed: Ravel’s piano concerto in G major, with Yunchan Lim  as soloist. Lim has been an international legend since, at age eighteen in 2022, he was the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition; his final-round account of Beethoven’s third piano concerto quickly won more than ten million views on YouTube. When people speak of Lim, they still tend to quote statistics such as these, which lead you to expect a more extrovert style than the one Lim shows. His public manner is borderline-shy; and his playing, though certainly brilliant, draws the audience and the orchestra into his own quiet. 

Ravel and Gershwin knew each other. Both “An American in Paris” and the concerto in G major are light, but both are also important Jazz Age creations. On this occasion, thanks largely to Lim, the Ravel concerto made a far greater impression than had “An American in Paris”: I’ve often heard it, but the originality of its sensuous sonorities and of its clockwork-like rhythms all made a very fresh impact. 

Stephenson’s “That the sunset” is for a large chorus, woodwinds, harp, and organ. Will it have many subsequent performances? Although I admired both the work’s varied overall architecture and several of its individual effects, it did little to plant Dickinson’s words in the memory - though it was moving to read them at leisure in the programme.

I’m still waiting for a performance that converts me to the music of Gerald Finzi, though it’s dear to the hearts of some people dear to me. His “For St Cecilia” - frightfully exalted and frightfully noble - is to words of Edmund Blunden, a poet of whose worth, again, I wait to be converted. On this occasion, the tenor solo was taken by Thomas Atkins: I admired the beautiful stylishness of his achievement without loving the music he was singing.

II: Royal Ballet School matinee, July 18

Much of the audience for the annual performances by ballet schools is inevitably composed of balletomanes: by which I mean people keener on dancers than on choreography (not least their families). But it’s reasonable and important to see these performances as ways of confirming that today’s students are being trained to honour the choreography of the companies to which these schools are attached, and therefore to field them in good productions of important ballets associated with the local companies. Over the decades, when I’ve seen the Royal Ballet School in productions of ballets by Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, and Marius Petipa, those occasions have shown that the students are being well schooled in the local traditions.

This year’s Royal Ballet School performance - coming at the end of Iain Mackkay’s second year as the school’s director - featured plenty of talented and well-drilled students. It was nonetheless depressing as a selections of choreography. The one Petipa ballet it showed was from Peter Wright’s often unmusical 1981 production of “Swan Lake”, which is enough to derange any student’s sense of Petipa style. (Wright’s invention of mock-Petipa variations for the princesses competing for the Prince’s hand is especially irksome.) 

Other ballets were by David Bintley, Jessica Lang, Cathy Marston, Kristen McNally, Andrew McNicol, NInette de Valois (a peculiar suite of dances from her “Checkmate”), and Christopher Wheeldon. Some ballets by these choreographers, especially Bintley, de Valois, and Wheeldon, may indeed put dancers through their paces in important aspects of style; but this matinee amounted to harmless choreographic trivia. Mackay comes from the Birmingham Royal Ballet stable, as does the Royal Ballet’s director of fourteen years, Kevin O’Hare. Although the Birmingham Royal company has always done some good work, it’s generally been more demi-character in style. The more refined classicism that for decades characterised the Covent Garden company may be falling out of fashion. 

2026 is the anniversary of Ninette de Valois’s first foundation of the school (“Academy of Choreographic Art”) that in due course became the Royal Ballet School. Only gradually, however, did De Valois came to realise that her school and company were the joint creation of the style shaped by Ashton as well as herself. She herself argued that every nation’s ballet style was shaped by its local folk style, and therefore had her students taught British folk dances, with their neat and fast footwork - though she once admitted that the students only saw the point in these once Ashton had created his two-act classic “La Fille mal gardée” (1960), which endures in repertory as an ebullient expression of style at its most innocently outgoing. De Valois’s “Checkmate” has the neat footwork - especially for the pawns - but so what? Whereas De Valois’s footwork looks like punctilious pedantry, Ashton’s is an exuberant expression of character and social behaviour. 

Although the final Grand Défilé has become an institutionalised ingredient of Royal Ballet School performances during this century, it’s really a concession to balletomania at its cheapest. Let’s get as many dancers onto the stage showing a few formulaic steps to cheaply sensationalist music! (That music is a true horror: Knudäge Riisager’s disgustingly orchestrated arrangement of étude by Carl Czerny.) As ballet display, this Grand Défilé is classicism reduced to sausage-machine level. 

III: Benjamin Appl, Wigmore Hall, Sunday 19

Seeing the baritone Benjamin Appl at the Wigmore Hall after ten months, I find him yet more pleasing to the ear and eye than I had remembered; but whereas his tall, blond good looks are unusual, his voice still sounds inoffensively conformist too much of the time. 

He’s intelligent and tasteful: his recital’s first half interleaved songs by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn with others (to German words) by Prince Albert. But his lack of individuality doesn’t make them personal: he has the kind of diction that makes his world ineligible, but not that makes them matter. It’s well known that he was the last student of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose manner with both vowels and consonants returns to the ear often when he sings. 

In this programme’s second half, however, Appl began to show his individuality in songs by Robert and Clara Schumann. In a selection of single songs (German words, again) by Reinecke, Reger, Sullivan, Stanford, Delius, and Ethel Smyth, he kept up the good impression without quite selling any of these composers as important. 

He ended, however, with six German songs by Grieg (op.48). Here, he cut through to his most intimate and personal, carrying words on light threads of vocal tone as if opening part of his own heart. 

IV, V: Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and Mahler’s “Tragic” Sixth at the Proms, July 20 and 22.

Symphonies by Beethoven and Mahler are an important part of each year’s Prom fare. On Monday 20, Gianandrea Noseda conducted the BBC Philharmonic in an account of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony that fizzed with nervous energy. Though he’s no pinup, he’s a wonderful conductor to watch, from his long hands and individual fingers down to his insteps and heels. 

And what you see is what you get: the connection between him and his players is riveting. Every stage of the famous symphony felt new-minted as an object-lesson in a thrilling debate about classical form and Romantic feeling. 

In the first half, he had directed Andrew Davis’s orchestral arrangement of Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542, and - a British premiere - Jessie Montgomery’s exceptional work for cello, singer, and orchestra, “These righteous paths”. The South African cellist Abel Selaocoe, not just playing cello but singing too, went straight to the collective hearts of the Albert Hall in Montgomery’s response to the decades of civil rights work in America. He then sang and played an encore that combined African material with pairs of simple two-note phrases in which he led the entire audience: a marvellously innocent experience for all present. 

On Wednesday 22,  Sakari Oramo led the BBC Symphony in Mahler’s Sixth - another debate about form and feeling, with Romanticism often straining into modernism - with a splendid amalgam of precision and high energy. It fascinates me that Mahler’s later symphonies become utterly different in each important rendition. Under Oramo, the intensely imaginative details of Mahler’s orchestration - who else makes woodwind notes so shrill and acid? who else makes percussion effects of such originality? - were gripping in themselves, part of a suspense drama that gradually led us through the complexities of Mahler’s thought. 

In terms of sonic imagination, this Mahler thus became an excellent sequel to the concert’s first part, György Kurtág’s “Stele” (1994), with its astonishing effects of muffled volume. Both works are marvelous to watch: every part of the orchestra produces sounds that aren’t what you expect. Is that effect of distant thunder really soft drumroll? Is that percussion sound really emanating from the harp? Have strings ever sounded so shrill? 

Oramo chose Mahler’s original ordering of the second and third movements: this added to the suspense of the symphony’s overall shape, so that each movement became a surprise, taking Mahler’s thought on a larger journey. Oramo also restored the third hammer blow in the final movement: though Mahler deleted it after the symphony’s original publication, it was sensational to hear on this occasion. The more I hear Mahler’s music, the larger a composer he keeps becoming, the more original the worlds that he creates. 

@Alastair Macaulay, 2026