Post 442. STILL FOLLOWING THE PROMS.

DESPITE THEIR MODERNITY.

I REMAIN FAITHFUL BUT LESS EAGER.
Pushed on by avant garde conductors, concert orchestras now seem compelled to undertake at least one composition by a 'promising new composer' with every appearance they make. This year at the Proms there has been ample evidence that the practice is spreading. So far I have watched the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra conducted by Canadian-Ukrainian Keri-Lee Wilson give, with only a fortnight to prepare, a fine performance of Valentin Silvestrov's 7th Symphony (Mr. Silvestrov, Ukraine's leading living composer, left Kylv with his daughter and granddaughter, in March), of works by Beethoven and Brahms, and of  Chopin's Piano Concerto No.2 played by Anna Fedorova. I have always thought Chopin's piano concertos to be nothing more than fancy tinkering up and down the scales with an occasional nod in the direction of the orchestra, and Brahms Symphony No.4 is very, very long, so the programme was not to my taste. But the orchestra was fine and the proms audience loved it.
I also watched Marin Alsop conduct the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra on their Proms debut: the programme consisted of works by Bartol, Prokofiev, Hannah Eisendle and Dvořák. I like Marin Alsop, I liked the orchestra, and I greatly respect the keyboard skills of Benjamin Grosvenor. Those were my positives. Everything else: from the Bartok - where the tramps should have done away with the mandarin at least ten minutes earlier - to Dvořák's Symphony No.7 which came from nowhere and went right back where it came from, was a negative.
So, too, was the Proms broadcast on BBC Radio 3 of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon and fronted by a favourite of every fun-at-the-Proms follower, violinist Pekka Kuusisto. Great orchestra, and always great to hear Pekka, but did he really have to let Vaughan Williams' lark out of its cage again? Never mind the number one choice of Classic FM listeners, I'd have shot that little bugger out of the sky long ago. To me, most twenty  and twenty first century classical music is a combination of the loudly discordant and the monotonously off-key. If I am alone in this, too bad. 
To quote the brilliant (recently retired) concert pianist Philip Fowke: "I'm not a student at all. I run on ignorance and prejudice...and instinct of course, that's very important."
He still is a brilliant pianist.
I still scribble this blog and follow the Proms: the latter less eagerly.

I don't like decimalisation and the metric system either.
But things will cheer up. They always do.
As Endeavour's Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) puts it: "Mind how you go."