Planet Extra - Welsh Proms

Romantics, Revolutionaries and Camp-Followers

The Welsh Proms

Cardiff, St David's Hall 9 - 25 July 2009

13.08.09
When they first kicked off in 1987, nearly a hundred years behind the London Promenade Concerts, the Welsh Proms were a faithful copy of what the world-famous season in the Albert Hall had looked like a generation before that. In concordance with this tradition, patrons came mostly from a middle-class minority of professionals, mainly resident in the north-western carapace of Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan. They were treated to a series of classical music concerts, a diet of heavyweight “works” deriving from Central European - in practice largely German - sources of the 18th and 19th centuries. 'Works' was an ideally-chosen word for this repertoire, being at once so German and so Victorian. For example, in the decades prior to 1900 Bach's Organ Works, along with the “works” of Beethoven, became almost as material a part of British life as the great engineering and building works which formed the backbones of its industrial cities. Indeed, the sound of Bach's well-known Prelude and Fugue in D minor almost seems to summon up aspect and atmosphere of the great Victorian city in its prime, whether London, Manchester, Glasgow or Cardiff. But, as Marx noted at the time, “all that is solid melts into air”: so that today, in some post-platonic way, both the German music canon and Das Kapital are fading, slowly, like Lewis Carroll's contemporary Cheshire Cat, albeit with a grimace rather than a grin.

In today's Wales, the cool cat planners of the Welsh Proms are forging ahead of most rivals when it comes to lateral thinking. This year's events have been more like a cultural carnival week than a classical music concert season. Incorporated into the Cardiff Festival some years ago, the Proms now present an eclectic mélange of musics, mixing Mardi Gras with Moody Blues and Rock with Reggae. Many bands in these broad categories – “the fringe” as they are predictably called - perform for little or nothing but are all duly featured in the Proms' abundance of glossy publicity, available in online and “material” form. I much enjoyed the Klezmer Kollectiv ripping through an irresistible set of “Balkan” numbers based on folk-derived popular music. To my ears the sound ranged from Transylvania to Kurdistan, full of complex 7/8 and 5/4 rhythms and catchy riff-like solo adventures. Like band founder Adam Cross, most members are recent graduates of the Welsh College of Music and Drama, where they discovered the so-called “klezmer” style of Jewish-influenced csardas music. Already familiar in Cardiff's shopping precincts (not to mention on YouTube) they attracted a large and appreciative crowd - this despite regular off-putting downpours. Two days later it was the turn of the Cardiff Style Ladies Chorus, a jolly bunch singing (usually for charity occasions) gender-bending barber-shop arrangements by their long-serving director, Angela Palmer. “Fringe” performances al fresco usually inspire a viva voce spirit in the audience: at times quite Rabelaisian and carnivalesque. One woad-painted punter, plastic pint in hand, was free with comments and suggestions, and even your mild-mannered columnist was pulled into a dispute over whether “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” was patented by Gene Pitney or Neil Sedaka. My interlocutor, being insistent and hard-hatted, emerged victor by consensus. Standing by were several like-uniformed colleagues, distracted from work on the building-sites by which St David's Hall is presently hemmed in. On the day, however, it was a strong wind rather than heavy plant percussion which threatened to disperse the harmonies of the shivering ladies. Ms Palmer was presently obliged to negotiate permission for a move inside the foyer space. This incident set off a train of thought. Ostensibly embraced by the Welsh Proms – but registered as a “fringe”, and exiled to the cold exterior – popular forms of music-making remain subject to subliminal prejudice. “Fringe” performers are, quite literally, “outsiders”, camp-followers of “serious” music. In lauding the two groups above I intended (innocently) to employ a common neologism – “standout”: but the word acquired an inescapable negative undertone. Doubtless this state of affairs suits many aficionados only too well. The moodily oppressed Liberty Street Jazz Band, for example, had few musical points to make, and would have been robbed of political point too by being invited inside. 

The audience at the Welsh Proms. (Photo by Brian Tarr, courtesy St David's Hall.)

It was warm and comfy in the main concert hall. Not so comfy for the “Prommers” who occupied a small, dedicated, standing-only space directly in front of the orchestra. One such enthusiast, present in both “classical” concerts I turned up for, planted himself with elbows on the stage, so close to the all-oblivious conductor that he might almost have reached up to tug his tails. Some readers may recall the incident – a coup de théâtre in its day – when Mickey Mouse jumped into the screen to do exactly that to Leopold Stokowski, conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in Walt Disney's epoch-making Fantasia (1940). Probably more of you will have relished another pertinent episode from “classical cinema”, in which Lilli von Shtupp's saloon act is interrupted when she trips over a fan's feet:

“Are you in show business, cowboy?”
“Jeez, no ma'am”
[As she kicks his feet away] “Then get your boots off my goddam stage!”

Mel Brooks's “Blazing Saddles” (1974) is a riot of interfaces between “outsider” and “insider” cultures. And after all, similar ideas were present when “Promenade Concerts” were set up to compete with elite subscriber-based seasons in the mid-19th century.

Meanwhile, my chosen concerts went under the twin rubrics of “Revolutionary” and “Romantic” – historical notions almost interchangeable in meaning. Thierry Fischer was Robespierre for the night, with a coruscating programme which included Berlioz's gorgeous song-cycle Nuits d'été, the earliest example of its genre designed for orchestra and voice, in an accomplished rendering by both parties. With some deeply satisfying singing, Katerina Karneus was equal to every subtle, sensuous shade of Berlioz's (even today!) astonishing palette. It was the first time I'd seen the lederene of the BBC NOW, Lesley Hatfield, who has revived the echt-Revolutionary (or, if you will, Romantic) concept of the virtuoso. Ms Hatfield is a sort of Paganina, foregrounding physical energy and expressive movement in the manner of that wild fiddler's day. In the middle bars of Au Cimetière (the cycle's still centrepiece), her glissando playing of a solo accompaniment in harmonics - the ghostly voice of the departed beloved - was revelatory. But I'm not sure her style would suit other circumstances: I'm thinking in particular of a showy violin concerto with a female soloist....

The BBC concert ended with the rousing noises of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, inspiration (inter alia) for the first internet symphony, Tan Dun's extrapolation from music originally composed for an automobile. Ludwig Van was a typical two-faced artist of the Romantic (or Revolutionary) period, and accordingly the “Romantic Prom” opened with his epic overture Leonora No. 3. The main course was Dvorak's Cello Concerto which I have always found unappealing even when confected by Casals or Rostropovich. Thomas Carroll had no better luck. In a “work” which has (in any case) few solo passages undisturbed by orchestral commentary, various sections of the Philharmonia seemed to gang up on Mr Carroll and stifle his instrument's resonance. The concert's coda was the 5th Symphony of Sibelius, which has one of the most dramatic codas in music. Here the conductor elicited a beautifully balanced account, equally convincing in the stirring “Romantic” passages and in the cooler, neo-classical pages: a stylistic “Revolution” which Sibelius brought to perfection in this symphony.

As we filed out, I overheard one customer asking “was that conductor Owen Orwell Hughes?”. Dr. Hughes, distinguished founder of the Welsh Proms, would surely have been tickled. As for Orwell, he asserted that in embracing revolution, the middle classes “had nothing to lose but their aitches”. Romance and Revolution are sound marketing strategies as well as Open University perennials. But whatever the aspiration, how can live music played by a rigidly stratified society like a concert orchestra, divided into hyper-sensitive micro-communities, ruled over by an autocracy of conductors and leaders – and, topping it all off, clad in evening dress! – ever represent the spirit of revolution? Even under the Bolsheviks, the great Russian orchestras meekly conformed to these formalist bourgeois appearances. I was about to add “more like an army”: a cliché, perhaps. But then, in a fairly obvious sense the Leningrad Philharmonic and the Red Army were two sides of the same coin. And to coin a phrase, propaganda is the camp-follower of war.

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