That this year’s Proms were big on God and death was maybe nothing special: God and death are ever-present in the concert repertoire. But looking back over the season, it was notable how many of the standout Proms events explored these topics. A case in point was Dialogues des Carmélites: the Poulenc opera brought to the Royal Albert Hall from Glyndebourne in a semi-staging.
Carmélites isn’t an easy piece. The product of its author’s fervent, anxious (some would say neurotic) but sincere engagement with Catholicism, it adapts the true story of a community of nuns who held their faith during the French Revolution and were guillotined as a result. They’re known these days as the Compiègne Martyrs. They went to their deaths singing the Salve Regina and the Veni Creator. Poulenc turns that historical detail into one of the most disturbing final scenes in all opera as the nuns process to the scaffold; you hear the sound of the blade fall time and time again (it’s in the score) with sickening thuds – the number of voices reducing at every fall until the last is cut off in mid-phrase.
Done badly, it can be absurd; done well, it leaves you devastated. And the more so because the magnificent masochism of this finale has been preceded by three hours of near-unrelieved tension as events close in on the community and fear invades its daily life. Especially the life of a young novice, Blanche, who has entered the order in search of refuge from worldly terrors (never a good reason) and is instead forced to confront them.
Glyndebourne’s staging had been done by the Australian director Barrie Kosky with austere, mixed-period designs and monastic wardrobes that leaned more toward the 1950s than the 1790s – presumably to universalise the story. But even in this stripped-down version for the Albert Hall, it was powerful, harrowing, ultimately glorious. South African soprano Golda Schultz shone with the warm, benign conviction anyone would want from a Prioress in testing circumstances. And though Sally Matthews didn’t project well, vocally, as Blanche, she made her story matter. We were with her as she joined that slow procession to the guillotine. And yes, we left the Hall in devastation. An extraordinary performance of a great work.
Handel’s oratorio Samson doesn’t force you to your knees in quite that way, although it has its moments. And its Proms performance by the Academy of Ancient Music under Laurence Cummings was effective on the clean, crisp terms set by the tenor Allan Clayton in the title role. A burly bearded hulk, he looked the part; but it’s a voice of stylish elegance that sang with purity, refinement, not a hint of bluster. Altogether beautifully done – as were the other main roles: Jacquelyn Stucker coolly glamorous as Dalila, and Jess Dandy a cavernously contralto Micah.
As a piece, though, Samson strikes me as perversely teasing. In the Bible this is a dramatic story, but in Handel’s hands it’s largely conversational. And when the moment comes for Samson to pull down the temple, expectations of big theatre aren’t fulfilled – because it happens offstage, to the accompaniment of a “Symphony of Horror and Confusion” that’s actually rather tame, and is merely a reported event.
The other strange thing about Samson is that in its final moments a character we’ve never seen before – an “Israelite Woman” – surfaces and takes over the show, bringing it to a dazzling conclusion with the most celebrated number in the score: “Let the bright Seraphim”. The “Woman” here was Joelle Harvey and impress-ive. But her efforts didn’t stop it feeling (as it always does) like the joke in Morecambe & Wise shows where an unknown woman would emerge at the end and steal the applause. If “Seraphim” weren’t such a spectacular aria, you’d be tempted to laugh.
There are moments in Belshazzar’s Feast – the mini-oratorio by William Walton – where a fair response is laughter. But that’s because the piece is such an extravagantly over-the-top delight, packing punch after punch into its short duration as Walton enjoys the worship of the Babylonian gods with almost the same glee as he then celebrates their downfall. To call the story-telling vivid would be under-statement: technicolor is more like it. The colours shone as brightly at the Proms, in a performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Klaus Makela, as they’d have done in 1931 when the music was premiered (and thought all too much by choral societies like those of the Three Choirs Festival who blacklisted it for years).
It was sadly all too much for the baritone soloist at the Albert Hall, Thomas Hampson, who struggled to find his notes. But otherwise, this was a thrilling performance, taken at heart-attack speeds by Makela but with a technical assurance that explained why he’s the current darling of the world conducting circuit. If the BBC Symphony Chorus could, despite excellent diction, barely spit out the words “Babylon is fallen”, it scarcely mattered. I believed them.
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