Three heatwaves in, but the summer hasn’t truly started until the Proms begin, and on Friday, Radio 3 and the BBC Symphony Orchestra light the blue touchpaper of eight weeks of music-making at the Royal Albert Hall and beyond. Like me, you might have been through the Proms guide marking up the concerts you most want to hear, but what’s always surprising as the summer of music unfolds are the concerts you couldn’t have predicted as being remarkable; the concerts that might look unexceptional on paper but in the flesh of performance find special resonance, be that the groups making their debuts, the brand new music and Proms premieres, or simply that alchemy that means that concerts that are days or weeks apart create musical and creative connections you’d never have thought possible.
Predicting surprises and revelations of a season that hasn’t even begun is of course a pointless and contradictory exercise, but of the new music on offer there are many works that should merit their own marker-pen tick. The First Night’s world premiere of Josephine Stephenson’s That the Sunrise Not Leave Us Unmoved, and Jessie Montgomery’s cello concerto for Abel Selaocoe, These Righteous Paths, on 20 July, should make a wonderfully contrasting pairing – Stephenson has written music of poetic refinement while Montgomery and Selaocoe’s concerto collaboration promises an experience of soul-searching power. “A living organism that gradually absorbs orchestra and audience alike into its breathing body” wrote Michelle Assay at the work’s North American premiere in Toronto.
And I will not be missing two elementally different orchestral visions that open concerts a few days apart: György Kurtág’s Stele, which Sakari Oramo conducts with the BBC Symphony on 22 July, and Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen’s Between Trees, with the London Philharmonic and Edward Gardner on 27 July.
Stele’s three short but shattering movements are a multilayered tapestry of lament that’s personal, musical and historical. Kurtág has said that this piece, composed for the Berlin Philharmonic in 1994, is a vision “of someone lying wounded on a battlefield. The fighting rages all around him, but he sees only a very clear, very blue sky … His feeling is that nothing is as important as this sky”. Written in memory of his friend, the composer and teacher András Mihály, the work opens with a reference to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio: the octaves that symbolise Florestan’s imprisonment, and his hope. But Kurtág’s piece offers no release. That blue sky remains out of reach in the Larghissimo-Adagio first movement, and especially in the detonation of despair of the second part, in which the gigantic orchestra is consumed by implacable, battering conflict, before a final movement that’s a muffled march to oblivion, a steady state of purgatorial desolation.
Tjøgersen’s Between Trees, written in 2021, meanwhile, is a vision of Nordic, nature-worshipping hopefulness. Made with just as much forensic care for orchestral image and idea as Kurtág’s piece, Tjøgersen’s inspiration is to take her listeners “on a sonic excursion”, an orchestral trip which, as she says, “gives the audience a feeling of being inside the forest rather than viewing it from a distance”. Her work opens with her representation of the sounds of squirrels eating nuts, and is inspired by the fungal interconnections through which trees interconnect and communicate. You’ll hear birdsong from cuckoos, owls and magpies, as well as age-old orchestral depictions of pastoral harmony: a quartet of horns, an oboe solo.
And beyond purgatory and pastoral harmony, there are more new-musical resonances with the premieres of not one but two triple concertos in the season: Édith Canat de Chizy’s Skyline, for three percussionists and timpani on 18 August, and a couple of weeks later on 6 September, there’s Gwilym Simcock’s concerto for an all-star trio of BBC Young Musician of the Year alumni, saxophonist Jess Gillam, horn-player Ben Goldscheider, and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. And in between those pieces, there’s yet another standout world premiere from Thea Musgrave, her bassoon concerto Out of the Darkness, composed for Amy Harman, on 23 August.
And there are two parts of Thomas Adès’s Dante to look forward to, with the composer himself conducting the National Youth Orchestra in Purgatorio (8 August), and Gustavo Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Phil in Inferno a few days later; the LA Phil also play the UK premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s urgently powerful Revolución Diamantina.
And, 21st-century music aside, my top picks at either end of the season are the Jupiter ensemble with lutenist Thomas Dunford in Dowland and Purcell on 21 July, and on the penultimate night, the Mahler Academy Orchestra playing instruments that Mahler knew and commissioned for the Vienna Philharmonic. Their recording of the Ninth Symphony is a genuine revelation: I can’t wait to hear them live.
The summer starts here – and here’s hoping the Royal Albert Hall’s air-con is up to it, otherwise you’ll be hearing the sounds of melting instruments as well as Radio 3 presenters. Good luck studio!
This week Tom has been listening to: Inspired by re-watching Julia Davis’s Nighty Night, the darkest and funniest TV comedy ever made – fight me! – and her monstrous creation Jill, whose reign of terror consumes Cath and Don and everyone else she touches, I’ve been listening to Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for My Name Is Nobody, whose surreally chirpy title-track is also the theme for Nighty Night. Morricone was on brilliant form in this picture, sending up Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries in The Wild Horde, and writing one of the great themes of world-weary satisfaction in Good Luck, Jack. And that’s just the first three cues!
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