The 1910 Last Night of the Proms, September 5, 2010
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| Henry Wood |
Given that the event is already a ritual re-enactment, restaging the 1910 Last Night of the Proms seems a risky move. Petroc Trelawney pitches the evening half-way between respectful tribute to Sir Henry Wood and historical curio: laugh at the mock-1910 fake palm trees; squirm at the gruelling three-hour programme; marvel at Wood’s thick baton; imagine the thick smoke of gentlemen’s cigar smoke filling the Queen’s Hall! The odd boater hat, kerchief and diamante aside, few prommers seem to have made an effort to recreate Edwardian dress. The mixed messages are verbal as well as sartorial: the national anthem which closes the concert offers the bizarre spectacle of an audience unsure whether to save the King or Queen.
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| Ralph Vaughan Williams |
1910 was the year Ralph Vaughan Williams wedded the twentieth-century to the Tudor period in Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, as Rob Young reminded us recently in the Guardian; European audiences were reeling from Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909) with its ‘total chromaticism’. Yet the Last Night finds little space for incipient musical modernism, alternating between the late romantic overtures of Wagner and virtuosic diversions by Dvorák or Paginini. Hindsight provides its shocks through programming rather than musical language: 16 separate items make up the bulging set-list, leaving the BBC Concert Orchestra a little exhausted by the conclusion. The evening’s eclecticism shames modern classical concerts: here late Romantic titans mingle with tin-pan alley tunesmiths. Readers who have spent a century imagining Beethoven‘s goblins in Howards End (1910) might not expect Helen Schlegel to have heard Dorothy Forster’s music hall favourite ‘Mifanwy’ in the same sitting.
Other dates haunt this centenary concert too. In 1941, after a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, the Queen’s Hall was destroyed by an incendiary bomb; we have forgotten the Royal Albert Hall’s status as a substitute. The following year, Vaughan Williams began a cello concerto, unfinished at his death. It finally has its premiere here, arranged by composer David Matthews and played with conviction by Steven Isserlis. It fulfils the role of what Henry Wood affectionately termed ‘novelties’; heard as part of an otherwise faithful recreation of the 1910 programme, its plaintive cello lines fall halfway between an elegy for something already lost and a prophetic warning of its destruction.
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| The Proms - courtesy BBC. |
