The First Night of this year's BBC Proms (BBC SO/Sakari Oramo plus youth ensembles, 13 July) offered, as it happened, an immediate comparison with one of the first Proms I can recall reviewing, back in 1973. Both concerts included Holst's The Planets, and that 1973 concert had preceded this with a beautiful composition by Elisabeth Lutyens. Forty-five years ago, she was one of four women composers whose works were featured at the Proms; without, as far as I recall, much comment on gender-related issues.
In 2018, by contrast, much has been made of the 22 women composers receiving performances at the Proms this year. This development was triggered, not least, by the anniversary of (partial) women's suffrage in 1918; and evidently also by the PRS Foundation's Keychange initiative, though no mention of the latter was made by David Pickard, director of the Proms, in his introduction to this year's prospectus. In 1973, as I recall, the Lutyens was performed to a more than half-empty hall, despite the inclusion of the audience-friendly Holst. In 2018, Anna Meredith's BBC co-commission, Five Telegrams (her seventh performance at the Proms in ten years), was not only the culmination of a sold-out First Night but had also, on the previous evening, been the subject of a son et lumière show on the exterior of the Albert Hall. On 21 August, it was, in addition, the subject of ‘the first ever virtual reality Prom’. 59 Productions’ video productions, sometimes very moving, lit up the hall's interior in the concert itself; and the whole event received widespread comment. I'd like to be able to report that this five-movement reflection on ‘various systems of communication during the First World War’ was worth all this attention. But though it had intermittent energy, Meredith's score possessed, for me, too few ideas of substance to justify its 22-minute span.
Surprising brevity, in addition to lack of compelling ideas, characterised some of the other new, and even not so new, works that I heard during the opening two weeks of the 2018 Proms season. Three days after the First Night (BBC PO/Juanjo Mena, 16 July), I even felt that Magnus Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto (2002), now claimed a ‘classic’, offers a puzzling mixture of the tonal and the non-tonal; as a vehicle, on this occasion, for the spectacular skills of the soloist, Mark Simpson (who, as a composer, rivals Meredith in Proms appearances), this concerto does its job well, however.
Much was anticipated from a programme by the London Sinfonietta under George Benjamin (at the Roundhouse, 21 July). Even before it became a memorial tribute to Oliver Knussen (who had died less than two weeks previously and was honoured by the inclusion of his 1988 composition, Flourish With Fireworks, on the First Night as well), this event was, as with Meredith's composition, heavy with the burden of World War I. Of the four composers commissioned here (as for Meredith's piece, with the involvement of 14–18 NOW), only Georg Friedrich Haas – whose the last minutes of humanity provided an expressively direct as well as technically adept master class in deploying consonance in a more ‘texture-music’ context – came up with music that sounded fresh rather than second-hand. In a further concert that day, the 41-year-old Latvian composer, Ēriks Ešenvalds, also showed, with his BBC-commissioned A Shadow, a setting of Longfellow, how it is still possible to conjure an arresting originality in fewer than ten minutes, this time with choral forces alone (aside from some metallophones played by the choir), using the kinds of tonal materials often derided as capable of producing only clichés. Opening this programme, the BBC Proms Youth Choir performed the Ešenvalds alone, brilliantly and from memory, under Simon Halsey.
On 23 July (BBC SO/Karina Canellakis), in another example of brevity coupled to the unremarkable, Spiral, by the American Andrew Norman, lasted scarcely long enough for its audience to settle. Part of a series commissioned from various composers by Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker, who had premiered it just six weeks before, this was also one of several works that I heard this season to raise the question: how much say does David Pickard, the present director of the Proms, really have in the selection of new works to be performed in his concerts? To the outsider, Pickard's role in 2018 would appear to be a much less autocratic one than Sir William Glock was still enjoying back in 1973: perhaps a good thing in itself, but a situation that raises lot of other issues – here, most obviously, about the practices as well as the policies around commissioning.
The matter of music by female composers, on the other hand, has very clearly been seized on by Pickard and made to some degree his own in the 2018 season. Here, the exhumation jobs mounted on early- and mid-twentieth-century works proved variably worthwhile, in my opinion. Pieces by both Lili Boulanger and a moving, somewhat Elgarian orchestral Nocturne (1913, here in only its second ever performance) by the Welsh composer, Morfydd Owen (BBC NOW/Thomas Søndergård, 20 July) suggested that we should certainly hear more of these and other neglected women composers in future. But in the late-night Prom including the London Contemporary Orchestra under Robert Ames, on 23 July, in which all the music was by women (and the audience interestingly quite different from that which usually attends the Proms), almost nothing seemed to rise above the mediocre. In the culminating composition, Daphne Oram's Still Point (1948–49, here billed as the ‘world premiere of [a] new realisation’), turntable techniques certainly advanced for their time – in this performance activated by modern technology operated by Shiva Feshareki and James Bulley – were ingeniously put to work on Oram's own musical materials, which themselves sadly turned out to be lamentably trite. Earlier, only Delia Derbyshire's short 1964 tape piece, The Delian Mode, shone out as competent and confident, as well as pioneering.
Part of Pickard's plan this season was to feature ‘a world premiere from a woman composer who has never previously been commissioned by the BBC’ in each of the eight Monday lunchtime recitals at Cadogan Hall. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the first two musical outcomes of such an excellent idea. But while the French composer Eve Risser's brief Furakela – tucked away amidst the French Baroquerie in a programme by the splendid harpsichordist, Jean Rondeau (23 July) – fizzed with improvisatory energy, the three Essays for string quartet by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Caroline Shaw (played by the first-rate American Calidore Quartet on 16 July) seemed merely ‘Americana’ clichés plus ‘extended techniques’, particularly glissandi, that had been gratuitously applied.
Back in the Albert Hall, Tansy Davies's BBC commission, What Did We See? (BBC PO/Ben Gernon, 25 July) presented orchestral music recast from her 9/11 opera, Between Worlds, premiered in 2015. Devising a coherent and compelling 25-minute structure that wisely emphasizes reflection on this tragic subject rather than any attempt to portray it more directly, this work bursts with the alluring textures now expected of this composer, offering a panoply of spotlit moments for different solo instruments – not least the horn (the instrument she herself used to play and which she must know inside out). From its opening, when horns play with their mouthpieces reversed, to some distinctly Brittenish but highly effective writing for high violins later on, What Did We See? offered a moving response to a subject difficult, but evidently for some composers absolutely necessary, to tackle; here without getting entangled in the extra complications that staging and text inevitably bring. Born, I was alarmed to realize, in the year in which I started reviewing Proms, Davies has, like Anna Meredith, become a regular in these seasons; this time, it was easy to concur with such a decision. Her composition proved to be a rewarding conclusion to my little ‘binge’ of Prom-going.
I wonder, finally, exactly how Pickard will implement his apparently promised part for the Proms in the Keychange strategy for increasing the number of performances by women composers over the next four seasons up to 2022. There has been some confusion as to whether this will just involve commissions for new works or any kind of broader, more historical support for performing music by women. If Pickard is indeed working towards a permanent 50/50 male/female split that goes beyond brand new pieces, I'll be particularly interested to see how he tackles this. If, on the other hand, he returns the ratio of new works by women to new works by men to that of previous Proms practice – and, by the standards of 45 years ago, the tally of four works by women was acknowledged as a good one – he will be, doubtless rightly, criticized for backsliding in the cause and, it would seem, reneging on a commitment already made.
