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qatsiOnly a few souls had turned up early on Tuesday morning, so it was easy to get a space on the rail for Prom 33. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and (in the second half) Chorus were conducted by Richard Farnes. They began with a work to mark Thea Musgrave's 90th birthday, her 1997 work Phoenix Rising. Like the previous occasion I heard a work by Musgrave - at that concert in 2008 - I came away with a broadly favourable impression of another colourful orchestral piece. It was a good thing I'd bought a programme, as it explained (to some extent) the visual antics that were also going on amidst the orchestra: "the solo horn and the timpani incite their colleagues into confrontation ... the solo horn prevails ... Garnering no support from former confederates, the timpanist downs sticks and exits in high dudgeon." During the interval we debated dudgeon - a word of unclear provenance, though I like the obscure Welsh option - and we noted that no-one is ever in low or moderate dudgeon. ("Low and High Dudgeon could be villages in Midsomer Murders, I suppose. Wallingford could double as both. Though maybe Benson for Low Dudgeon.")
The second half was a longer work, Brahms's German Requiem. The choir were joined by soprano Golda Schultz and bass-baritone Johan Reuter, both of whom turned in modest but stirring performances. It's not a work I know well, though I remember vaguely seeing a performance in Oxford when I was an undergraduate, and for some reason then and now I find the second movement quite familiar; the programme notes its relation to both the composer's First Piano Concerto and also to a Bach cantata, BWV27. It's inevitable, I suppose, that almost any piece of good music can, when inspected in a certain way, seem like Bach. We were spared thunder during the concert, but it was raining heavily afterwards as we found our way to South Kensington, appreciative of the cover of the long subway leading to the station.
The second half was a longer work, Brahms's German Requiem. The choir were joined by soprano Golda Schultz and bass-baritone Johan Reuter, both of whom turned in modest but stirring performances. It's not a work I know well, though I remember vaguely seeing a performance in Oxford when I was an undergraduate, and for some reason then and now I find the second movement quite familiar; the programme notes its relation to both the composer's First Piano Concerto and also to a Bach cantata, BWV27. It's inevitable, I suppose, that almost any piece of good music can, when inspected in a certain way, seem like Bach. We were spared thunder during the concert, but it was raining heavily afterwards as we found our way to South Kensington, appreciative of the cover of the long subway leading to the station.