Proms 38 & 39: Bach Day | Classical review
Royal Albert Hall, London
The fashion for making big orchestral arrangements of Bach peaked in the first half of the 20th century, and then gradually disappeared as the early music movement got underway. In a day devoted to the composer, in which John Eliot Gardiner and his English Baroque Soloists had already traversed the Brandenburg Concertos at Cadogan Hall, the evening’s two main-stage Proms offered a largely nostalgic look at how audiences once heard Bach, and how later composers viewed him.
Two of the nine works in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s Prom under Andrew Litton were new, though only one of them was really an arrangement. As a large-scale transcription of a movement from a viola da gamba sonata, Alissa Firsova’s Allegro was a bright and multicoloured piece that attracted attention through its command of instruments used in breeze-block manner – sharply defined, if not exactly subtle. Tarik O’Regan’s Latent Manifest drew on a few bars from a solo violin sonata to create a more personal canvas, taking us a long way from a literal reworking into the realms of evanescent fantasy, with delicately evocative results. The rest of the programme – which included showpieces by Stokowski and Respighi, as well as Walton’s dapper Wise Virgins suite, and more workmanlike orchestrations by Henry Wood and Malcolm Sargent – was interesting, though by the time we had heard the third reworking of Sheep May Safely Graze, it was starting to sound like lamb dressed up as mutton souffle.
Earlier, David Briggs marshalled the full forces of the Royal Albert Hall organ for the console equivalent of these orchestral extravaganzas. Virgil Fox’s arrangement of Komm, Süsse Tod took the prize for the most lurid. At its best, Briggs’s own arrangement of the Third Orchestral Suite sounded suitably grand; at its worst, grandiose.
