This season of the BBC Proms, the 2025 series, started at the Royal Albert Hall with a cacophony of musical selections that demonstrated the technical excellence of various performers but left doubts about the unity of programming. The opening night, which was conducted by Sakari Oramo and performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, homes in premieres, classics and rarities was the beginning of the long anticipated classical music festival.
Birthday Fanfare of Arthur Bliss opened the evening, written in honour of Sir Henry Wood as the founder of Proms. The jubilant work in brass and timpani promptly led to the Mendelssohn Hebrides Overture played straight away, as reported by TheGuardian. The tonal shift between the two pieces, although very well performed, was too sudden, especially in terms of strings and woodwinds.
Then it leapt into the modern with the world premiere of The Elements by Errollyn Wallen, now the (and again the) Master of at the King. Wallen describes her composition as an exploration of the “fundamentals of music, life and love” (The Guardian), however, documents describing the official Proms referred to it as an ode to the periodic table of orchestral elements. The piece was cast in single movement in three parts, and featured a brooding first section, a sweeter and Ravel-inspired middle, and closing on a more Purcell-esque piece (borrowing heavily on Purcell’s The Fairy Queen). In all its ambitions, critics said the piece never managed to retain a unified identity.
The most potent moment of the evening probably was Jean Sibelius Violin Concerto in D minor with a famous soloist Lisa Batiashvili. There is special meaning to this performance: this was the first time Batiashvili played the concerto with Oramo since she was only 16. The unbreakable artistic connection between them was noticeable in the entire piece to produce an emotionally concentrated and technically immaculate performance. Critics admired how virtuosic Batiashvili was combined with subtle passion, especially the cadenza of the first movement. Oramo, as has always been the case with his preference to Sibelius, directed with intensity restrained, bringing this work both drama and lyrical elements and doing so at all without being overwrought or melodramatic.
The second part of the programme included the Sancta Civitas, a seldomly performed oratorio by Ralph Vaughan Williams by the eponymous book of the revelation. Although the score itself has been a topic of discussion throughout the ages, the performance of such done on the Friday night was characterized by its sweeps and mastery. The resulting massed chorus of BBC Symphony chorus, BBC Singers, and the London Youth Choirs creators made poetry and transparent with the challenging music. Gerald Finley used passionately in the baritone role and Caspar Singh made the best of his cameo role as he sang along with the bust of Sir Henry Wood.
Although musically the performance of individual soloists was superb, the general design of the programme resulted in certain critical retrospection. The balance between the introduction fanfare, the overture typical of Romantic period, the contemporary premiere, and the large-scale choral music set the right mood but left the listeners with tonal imbalance that disrupted the perception of the concert as a compound. To quote a reviewer in The Guardian (Tim Ashley) the evening was, in his words, “curiously uneven but nothing in the performance itself could be criticized on grounds of execution”.
These critiques notwithstanding, the opening night at the Proms proved that the festival continues to be loyal to such virtues as musical diversity, cooperation, introducing established artists and unprecedented music. People can listen to the performance again on BBC iPlayer until 12 October, or listen to the performance on BBC Sounds.
BBC Proms 2025 will run until 13 September, and the future concerts likely will include more premieres, major orchestras, and soloists around the world.
