Electric Proms: Elton John and Leon Russell – review
Roundhouse, London
Far from the bitch being back, the interviews given by Elton John in advance of the opening night of the Electric Proms stressed a calmer, gentler Sir Reginald Dwight of Pinner. Managing to hold his famously waspish tongue, he seemed at ease, a patron of the arts keen on charitable good works, as well as the kind of cause that many would consider lost. Everyone knows that as a recovered addict of some appetite – he used to fly over the Alps and think, “that’s all the cocaine I sniffed” – Elton reached out to Eminem and Robbie Williams in their times of trouble. But the recent news that he did the same for Paul Gascoigne suggested his Windsor pile occasionally serves as a five-star drop-in centre for showbiz waifs and strays.
So he’s still the same old impulsive Elton who blew a fortune on flowers, just channelling such spontaneity more productively – although the revelation in the Radio Times that he wrote to the honours committee, ticking them off for not awarding Bruce Forsyth a knighthood, hints of one too many quiet nights in watching Strictly.
This evening would not have happened without that same impetuousness. Elton decided to rehabilitate the career of Leon Russell, one of the chief influences on his best work, while on safari, having broken down in tears of nostalgia after being reminded of Russell’s elegant country soul by the contents of David Furnish’s MP3 player.
Despite playing with various Beatles and Stones in the early 70s, Russell has missed out on the lucrative nostalgia trail until now. Some, but not all, of The Union, the new album he and Elton have made together – and aired in full here – holds its own with either party’s best work. It’s certainly a reminder of Russell’s influence on Elton’s Americana years, a long gone creative sweet spot he’s been gamely attempting to relocate since 2001′s Songs from the West Coast. Elton’s not shy about any of this either, kicking off with a selection of tunes imprinted with Russell’s DNA, including a nicely restrained “Tiny Dancer”, and a rare airing of the freewheeling outlaw tale “Ballad of a Well Known Gun” from 1970′s Tumbleweed Connection.
Any notion that the entire exercise is anything other than heartfelt is dispelled once Russell, who had brain surgery in January, arrives from stage right, aided by a motorised wheelchair. The long white beard and froggy rumble of a voice suggest a southern Gandalf, and he and Elton – in glittery black tails – make a touchingly odd couple. There’s the whiff of elderly bromance about the proceedings, not least because The Union‘s strongest moments are concerned with facing down mortality. “There’s No Tomorrow” swings low and slow like a New Orleans funeral march while the point is hammered home by gospel ballad “In the Hands of Angels”. Written by Russell, it’s addressed to Elton, whom he credits with saving his life.
The Electric Proms has been very much for seniors this year, with Elton and Russell followed by evenings with Robert Plant, then Neil Diamond. Even Elton’s special guests seem nostalgic: Plan B and Rumer might be two of 2010′s buzzier young artists but they both look backwards. Each is offered a single chance to shine and hard-nut soul-boy Plan B’s swagger is more impressive than his voice during a wobbly, Elton-backed, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”. Rumer is a more natural fit as her clean, Karen Carpenter-indebted vocal could have come straight from the mid-70s. The choice of song also helps: Russell’s “This Masquerade” has history with several singers from the smoother end of the spectrum, including Carpenter herself.
The real winner, though, is Elton, now carefully positioned as mentor to artists old and new. All he needs is a solo record that lives up to that billing.
Proms 75 & 76 | Classical review
Royal Albert Hall, London
It’s been said that the Great Britain celebrated at the last night of the Proms is a country that no longer exists; that the half-concert, half-Pythonesque ritual is a monocultural fantasy, jingoistic and egregiously sentimental. Saturday’s instalment starred a Ukranian violist and American soprano led by a Czech conductor. Behind me were cramped Finnish, Polish and American radio presenters, while before and above me the sea of red, white and blue flooding the hall was comprised of flags representing the UK but also the US, Japan, Australia, the Czech Republic, France, Norway, Denmark and Russia.
Britannia herself was the American Renée Fleming, upholstered in a Vivienne Westwood dress whose soaring breast plates would drown a lesser voice. She had concluded the first half of the evening with some nuanced Strauss songs, but her best performances came in the second half, both in the dazzling vocal fireworks with which she adorned Arne’s patriotic ode and also in two arias from Smetana (Dobrá) and Dvorak (Song to the Moon). Fleming’s intensity and precision of feeling was a masterclass in itself, and also an inspiration for Jiri Belohlávek and his orchestra, who at last forgot how tired they all were.
Indeed, if anything marred the evening it was the lacklustre playing of an admittedly overworked orchestra, who singularly failed to meet on equal terms Fleming’s Strauss or Rysanov’s stirring adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Roccoco Variations. This was a particular shame in a programme that was musically more thoughtful than many. Similarly, in the premiere of Jonathan Dove’s declamatory and upbeat Whitman setting, Song of Joys – which, in the best tradition of high-spirited English choral music left me feeling slightly queasy – and Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens, Belohlávek revealed his limits as a choral conductor.
The same could not be said of the previous night, in which John Eliot Gardiner held a packed auditorium spellbound for the diverse aural entertainments that make up Monteverdi’s 400-year-old Vespers. Gardiner has his detractors but his choir and orchestra’s devotion to his often idiosyncratic vision is an inspiration in itself. If ever there was a work, too, in which the depths of expression combine seamlessly with pomp and circumstance, and which plays to the acoustic strengths of the Royal Albert Hall, it is this – a Prom to remember.
Proms 56 & 57: Minnesota Orchestra/Vänskä | Classical review
Royal Albert Hall, London
The Minnesota Orchestra’s Proms with their music director Osmo Vänskä were object lessons in the creation of excitement and meaning without resorting to rhetorical extremes. Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth, given on consecutive days, were the main works. We have learned to think of both primarily in terms of grand gestures, but they work just as well, if not better, when some of the expected loftiness is removed.
Vänskä’s preference for tension and detail over volume and textural weight results in playing of exceptional lucidity from an orchestra that often functions with the precision of a chamber ensemble. Shorn of its usual upholstered opulence, Bruckner’s Fourth has a combination of rawness, sensuousness and grace that peers back through Wagner to Schumann and Beethoven. The latter’s Ninth, meanwhile, was extraordinarily volatile, even in the adagio – done with rapturous fluidity on this occasion.
Neither performance was without controversy. The Bruckner was given in a new edition by Benjamin Korstvedt incorporating cuts that, some have argued, were made under pressure and are therefore inauthentic. And Vänskä’s insistence on precise enunciation in the finale of the Beethoven led to syllabic, declamatory singing from the BBC Symphony Chorus. They sang from memory, though the less than ideally matched soloists remained score-bound.
The Bruckner was paired with Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, played with understated virtuosity and sardonic humour by Alisa Weilerstein. Berg’s Violin Concerto, meanwhile, accompanied Beethoven’s Ninth. Gil Shaham, a late replacement for the indisposed Lisa Batiashvili, was the soloist in a touching performance that combined great formal control with nostalgic intensity.
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.
