BBC Proms 2009 - starting this week!

This year's Proms start on Friday 17th July. Live, broadcast on radio, TV, online and available for repeat on demand listening.

This year's Proms are solid good value. The First Night starts with fireworks, of course! – a short burst of Stravinsky's Fireworks, op 4. The music in the video comes from The Firebird, which it eventually inspired, but visually this clip is fun! This concert has an all-star line=up: Alice Coote singing Brahms's Alto Rhapsody (the reason I'm going), Stephen Hough and the sisters Labèque, heralding this year's emphasis on music for the piano; Ailish Tynan and Jiřì Bélohlávek. The atmosphere on the First Night, though, is what makes it special. Even if you can't be there in person, crack open the champagne or at least a cold beer and imagine!

Next night, Paul McCreesh conducts Haydn The Creation with a new, revised text.

This year's earlier Handel Partenopes have been covered on this blog – ENO HERE and Theatre an der Wien HERE. The BBC broadcast the Vienna performance with Christine Schäfer and Patricia Bardon earlier this year – it was excellent! This Proms version on 19th July has Lars Ulrik Mortensen conducting Concerto Copenhagen. This one should stand up to the more elaborate staged performances by sheer musical quality, since CoCo is one of the top specialist baroque orchestras in Europe. With Andreas Scholl, Christophe Dumaux, and Inger Dam-Jensen singing, you can bet this is going to be good. I heard Inger sing songs by Grieg, Stenhammer and Sibelius ten days ago at the City of London Festival. She's in good form.

That's the first weekend, three concerts of nearly 80. The Proms are fun because they're a communal event. Even if you listen alone on your PC you are part of what is happening perhaps thousands of miles away. Most years I listen to nearly every Prom, live and on the radio. Last year I wrote about 45 of the concerts, so please keep coming back to this blog for more. There's a button "Subscribe" top right which enables automatic updates. Here you won't get much cliché. Contributions and suggestions are welcome. I've already done a preview about new music at this year's Proms HERE. Being a mass audience festival supported by the taxpayer, it's pretty remarkable how much new music gets into the Proms.

Audi Partenope Wien Schäfer

As Sue Loder says in her review linked below, Handel's Partenope is like London buses. You wait ages and then three come along at once. She's writing about the Vienna production directed by Pierre Audi in Vienna with Christine Schäfer, David Daniels, Florian Boesch and Les Talens lyriques, providing period instrument ambience.

".........It is this finale which cleverly encapsulates Audi’s vision of Partenope’s latently violent world: the confrontation becomes an actual boxing match set inside the villa, complete with ropes, hanging microphone, glitzy scorecard girls and the protagonists in lurid red and white towelling robes. The watching characters seem to hold their breath as Arsace makes the winning blow: his opponent must fight, like him, bare-chested (and thus betray her sex). This cruel twist breaks her spirit, and reveals all the treachery and immorality lying beneath the sham glamour of their lives. Handel’s final chorus is oddly abrupt and Audi leaves us wondering whether any of them will ever love each other again. No heroes here in Vienna, just a baroque opera for the 21^st century, and none the worse for it. "

Read the whole piece here with production pix:
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2009/02/no_home_for_her.php

ENO Partenope Handel

Melanie Eskenazi is one of the most perceptive writers on the baroque. This is what she's written on the new ENO production of Handel's Partenope :

"Partenope (Greek for ‘virgin’) was, according to one legend, cast ashore on the coast near Naples after throwing herself into the sea in her despair at not having been able to sing Ulysses to his death – it’s almost as good a name for an opera as “Orfeo” and this first staging of the work in London since 1983 is given an exciting production, further strengthening English National Opera’s pre-eminence as the leading house for Handel opera. “Partenope” could almost be called a chamber opera, and in purely visual terms one might have been looking at a production of Richard Strauss’s “Capriccio” – but more of that later. It’s singing that counts in this music – and this was an evening of exceptional Handelian style. Rosemary Joshua’s Partenope was a worthy successor to her Semele, ‘L’Amor ed il Destin’ typical of her confident delivery, silvery tone and mastery of phrasing. In Act Two, ‘Qual Farfalletta’ was perhaps a little subdued, but ‘Quel volto mi piace’ was incisively characterised. It helped that she was not only beautifully costumed but given graceful and appropriate things to do whilst singing, neither of which advantages were given to the Emilio of John Mark Ainsley, who must surely now win the award for ‘Singer Who Has Survived the Most Stupid Stage Business Whilst Singing Impossibly Florid Music’. Ainsley sang his first aria whilst placing bodies and photographing them, his third up a ladder wearing a skirt and a turban, but ‘Barbaro Fato sì’ topped them all, standing on a toilet, leaning halfway out of a transom window and smoking. All taken in his stride, of course, the rapid coloratura delivered with firm steady tone and immaculate diction..........."

"Alden and his co-director Peter Littlefield, together with the set designer Andrew Lieberman, took their inspiration from Surrealist writers and artists, setting Partenope’s court in a pared-down, blond-and white version of Man Ray’s studio: the character of Emilio is presented as the photographer, arranging images just as he arranges the lives of the other protagonists, and the heroine is an emotionally well balanced version of Zelda Fitzgerald – you could just see this lady using a belt to ensure that the lift stayed on their floor.Does it work? Yes, it does – the world of the early eighteenth-century is not that far distant from that of the early twentieth in terms of its surface gloss and its emergent questioning of the relationship between Reason and Emotion, between the urbane and the spontaneous, and the concept is wonderfully coherent despite the demands made upon some of the singer / actors within it. It’s also very funny in parts, and although I did not always warm to Amanda Holden’s chirpy translation (“Crikey!” “O shit!”), it certainly engaged most of the audience."

Here's the full text :
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=6349