We’re three weeks into the Proms, and there have been some tremendous concerts, but listening on Radio 3 there’s a possibly unconsidered aspect of the season that I’ve particularly enjoyed, and that’s what happens in the interval.
Speech radio has been in decline on Radio 3 in recent years, but here we are, for 20 minutes or so every evening, treated to a conversation springing from whatever music is being performed, and it’s invariably informative and an all-round enhancement to proceedings.
I’m sure these interval discussions could easily be recorded in advance, but what I especially like about them is that they are as live as the music we hear either side.
The first half of the Prom ends and then whoever is presenting welcomes an expert guest to the Radio 3 box in the Royal Albert Hall — I always picture them climbing the stairs, Wimbledon champion-style (and they do sometimes arrive a bit breathless) — and the talking plays out against the gentle background hubbub of audience activity.
Scholarly insights that have stood out for me in recent Proms intervals have included those of Daniel Elphick (on Shostakovich), Rosamund Bartlett (on Scriabin), and Julia Burbach (on Rossini).
One evening’s interval was given over to the musicologist Katy Hamilton, who I’ve come to really like as a guest on Record Review. She was looking ahead to upcoming Proms, with a blend of authority and accessibility that I think marks her down as a real find. Someone should give her her own show.
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The hoary old topic of applause between movements seems to have been given a rest this year. And I wouldn’t be bothering to address it myself if something fairly extraordinary hadn’t happened during the Prom last Sunday in which the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, with Leonidas Kavakos as the soloist.
Kavakos, perhaps the best-known Greek on the current classical music scene, is a dashing figure with star quality. Listening at home you could sense the audience’s excitement when he took the stage. And then — at a climactic moment midway through the concerto’s first movement — that excitement couldn’t be contained and applause broke out. That’s right — applause not between movements but actually in the middle of a movement. Like a jazz audience might applaud an instrumentalist’s solo with the piece still in progress.
I’d never heard applause in the middle of a movement before, and thanks to having a friend in the audience when the moment occurred, I learnt that the conductor — Paavo Järvi — turned round at this point and glared at the perpetrators.
Under the circumstances, the applause that followed the end of the first movement was bound to happen. It was as sustained and as rapturous as you might get at the end of an entire piece, and Kavakos, I’m told, found himself signalling to the audience — in case they hadn’t realised — that there was more to come. During the interval, the presenter on the night, Martin Handley, was sufficiently struck to report the Kavakos gesture, though there was no mention that I heard of the Järvi glare.
I’ve no strong feelings either way about applause between movements, but I do have a theory about it, which is that it’s a much more common occurrence when a soloist is involved than when an audience has only an orchestra in front of them. One can relate to an individual — alone and exposed in such a vast yet somehow intimate space as the Albert Hall — in a way that one possibly can’t with a group enterprise. And you want to show that individual the love.
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The Tchaikovsky violin concerto was so tumultuous that my friend texted me during the interval to say, “The second half is going to be a bit of a let-down after that spectacular performance”, and it got me wondering about the traditional format of not just a Prom but of any classical music concert: a short orchestral piece to start off with, then a concerto, then the interval, and then a symphony.
What would it have felt like if Leonidas Kavakos and the Tchaikovsky violin concerto had provided the climax to the concert rather than the Scriabin symphony that occupied the evening’s second half? And the Scriabin had been performed earlier?
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Controller of Radio 3 and of the Proms Sam Jackson was on Radio 4’s Feedback this week answering Andrea Catherwood’s questions about the future of the Proms at a time of cuts to the BBC’s output. He certainly couldn’t guarantee that the Proms wouldn’t be affected. He hinted that one cost saving might lie in the reduction of the number of foreign orchestras who appear during the season. That would indeed be incredibly sad. Which foreign orchestras the Proms has attracted is the first thing I look for in the programme.
Perhaps the future lies in more work for the BBC’s own orchestras (and others from the UK), with money splashed out on star overseas soloists — eg Leonidas Kavakos, complete with spontaneous outbreaks of applause.
