Pyrotechnic Prom: Nielsen, Sibelius, Mozart and Walton in Prom No 1

And apparently there were real fireworks at the end of the second piece? Wish I'd been there now. I'm not sure I did hear the fizz of them going off, even listening to my recording from Radio 3 on professional 'cans'. . .

If I hadn't  been told, I might have just thought it was someone in the audience sneezing. Why, oh why, have concert (and opera) audiences these last two or three years become peculiarly bronchitic? The coughs (one sharp one had me ripping my headphones off) damn nearly ruined Sibelius's mock Turkish confection altogether.

So it's unfamiliar? So it's a it of a candy floss kind of thing? Still doesn't entitle you to cough all the way through it. I was reminded of an old joke from the Arena years ago, who chanted after the interval "That was an orchestral suite, not a cough suite!"

As an orchestral suite, of course, it was a little peculiar, starting off with all the wobbly belly dancing any Sultan could desire, but lapsing rather strangely into a kind of Nordic blues over a misty Finnish lake. Which did complement, in its way, Nielsen's Maskerade Overture which began this festival with a real fizz and sparkle.

I'm not, on the whole, a great fan of BBC Proms commissions; few last, after all. Probably Gary Carpenter's Dadaville won't either. Though it was nicely raucous and vivid (like most of this first Prom!) and there was a wonderfully fat tuba and some pretty vicious percussion. Otherwise, a rather odd (but appropriate for the first half, I suppose) mix of Nordic moodiness and blues broken up by some thoroughly Neapolitan (or maybe even Ischian?) crockery crashing and banging about in the cucina.

Max Ernst 'Ddaville'; courtesy of Tate Modern Liverpool

Lars Vogt's Mozart Piano Concerto was eloquently raucous too, lyricism unabated only for part of the middle movement. I understand why the audience wanted to applaud after the pyrotechnical first movement, but that's not to say I sympathise. Vogt is doubtless dynamic, and determined; but I do tire these days of that kind of relentless dynamism and devilry, however exciting it can be.

Though the prom goer who could tire of the BBC SO and the various BBC Chorus's (were any left at home last night?) Belshazzar's Feast in its Walton incarnation would have to be tired of life. Intensely lively and vivid, with astonishing singing. A very fiery performance indeed.

On the BBC iPlayer from today

This blog may close . . .

. . . soon, due to lack of interest.

And Google . . .which no longer seems to be the least bit interested in indexing its own bloggers for its own search engine.

There will, however, be a review of the first night; and probably of the first Chamber Music Prom on the 20th of July here. However, I was not particularly enamoured of much in the first half of the season and have booked tickets mostly for August and early September.

We'll maybe see you in August . . .

Fur, Feather, Fetish and Fuzziness

 I can’t really do better than Mark Valencia on Bachtrack . . .at least for the moment, while I'm dealing with some other issues.

Except for a technical note. |I watched the Aix en Provence Alcina off the Opera Platform on a widescreen telly connected to my Mac. The video was produced by Arte; and it was awful. It was frequently fuzzy, sometimes stuttered, the frame rate was too low and the soundtrack a few milliseonds out of sync. All the hallmarks, in fact, of an amateur and quick transfer to an MP4 video.

Now, my own speciality is audio, not video, but even I can do better than make an MP4 that looks like a poorly copied VHS video. And, surely, Arte can too? Especially when the original must have been broadcast quality.

The production is clever and absorbing, the orchestra brilliant. But the video . . .I had to give myself an extra interval during the acts to rest my eyes.

I’m pretty enthused about The Opera Platform, but poor quality video, especially for a production of this complexity, is a bad advert for it.

All the same, well worth catching. (See update below!) Even more worthwhile it you can read the subtitles: in French on The Opera Platform, or in German on Arte.de. Come to think of it, if The Opera Platform is really to be as 'European' as it apparently intends, wouldn't a choice of subtitle languages be useful?

Update:

In response. Luke O'Shaughnessy, Project Manager at The Opera Platform wrote to us:

"The version that is currently online is a plain recording of the live streaming and will shortly be replaced by a remastered version that is currently in preparation. I hope the quality of the next version, that will be subtitled in six languages also, will be of a better quality."

At last! I was beginning to wonder if a 'European' Opera Platform could truly be so if most of its online offerings were only subtitled in either German or French. 

It's probably easier for people who are truly bi- or tri-lingual, but I just watched the Rotterdam production of Terry Gilliam's Benvenuto Cellini. (Also Arte, and decent quality!) It's peculiarly distracting to hear an opera sung in French (or Italian) but to also be mentally translating German subtitles at the same time if you happen neither to be French or German. (That, though, was partly my own fault: I found there was a version without subtitles afterwards.)