Last Night of the Proms (BBC Symp. Chorus, Bbcso, Davis) [DVD]

 

 

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Obesitas is a major problem for singers, conductors and for festivals! This long long long program with much talk intertwined did bore me after some 60 minutes. I stepped into a time capsule back to the year 2000 - what is 10, 11 years anyway? - and it was unbearable. Everything looks so amazingly old fashioned you'd forget there's a music program going on. I own several performances on DVD from the 70s - for example Solti's Elgar program with the London Philharmonic - and I hadn't the problems I encountered with this one. Probably it are the white smokings the males wear and the tea towels in which the females dress themselves distract me so much I didn't enjoy the program at all. Then for the Salome closing scene a singer appears who looks like submarine and roars like a sea lion. Distracting again; although I've learned that `real beauty is on the inside' I think it's a lie. Conductor Andrew Davis tries to bring some passion into the Salome dance but he only manages to deliver that the English way: in fake gestures and in music delivered without any passion at all. The Bach/Elgar work also doesn't have any passion so it only sound like plodding through the mud. What a lousy way to start a program! Why not start with a jolly overture by Malcolm Arnold or with the Shostakovitch Jazz suite as a rousing beginning? The Last Night of the Proms seems to me, I'm Dutch so I don't understand the whole tradition of it very good, a very British way to celebrate some pomp and circumstance and patriotism. Maybe I'm jealous because over here nobody seems to know more than 10 words of our national anthem anyway... and you British who adopted the Elgar `Land of Hope and Glory' and the `Rule, Britannia' thing (what do you rule precisely?) know them all.
So now for the music and the recording.
Bach/Elgar: a great piece played indistinctively, as if conductor and orchestra have stage fright.
Mozart: an anorectic soloist plays the 4th violinconcerto very beautiful but the way she's supported by the orchestra is very middle of the road.
Strauss: Andrew Davis stated in the interview that Strauss is one of his favourite composers so beware if he conducts one of his not so favourite ones! This is not Strauss, this is again a middle of the road run through some difficult notes. Look at the face of the flute soloist in his very difficult passages; he's in despair as if he hasn't seen such music ever before.
Jane Eaglen, who's presented as `one of the leading Brunnhilde's of the time' is over the top, both visually, in voice quality AND sonically. Much vibrato and when intimate singing - yes that's possible with Strauss - is required, the voice loses quality; rather than sounding soft and caressing, it sounds thin and unsupported. So this is for fans of volume. The voice could have been mixed a little bit more forward so the words can be better heard.
Rest of the program: patriotic British fare I think, not of any interest to this European listener with the public doing some flag waving, whistling and some penguins standing in the front row doing an imitation of a `Walk to the Penguin Breeding Grounds'. Jolly fun!
The recording is very flat on an 2 channel TV. Like many other DVD's the climaxes are no climaxes so you can't hear any glorious brass playing if there's any at all. Verdict: outdated.

What can be said about this wonderful song of Elgar's ,
sung by tousands of people at the Royal Albert Hall , in Dolby Digital 5.1 sound .
Even this track only worths to get this DVD .

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