Prom 2: Bax, Finzi and Elgar: Andrew Kennedy (tenor), Nigel Kennedy (violin), BBC Concert Orchestra; Paul Daniel (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London 19.7.2008 (JPr)


This concert was to be ultimately overshadowed by the antics and musicality of Nigel Kennedy but an evening of music by British composers began straightforwardly enough with rarely heard works by Bax and Finzi. The latter’s Intimations of Immortality to words by William Wordsworth was in fact getting its first performance at the Proms.

Arnold Bax’s The Garden of Fand, described by the composer as the last of his Irish works, depicts the sea. The music begins by illustrating a small craft (I imagined a coracle) on calm waters before a wave tosses it onto Fand's magical island. Distinctly Celtic themes abound as the dancing and feasting that are heard here with xylophone and tambourine to the fore, is reminiscent of Wagner’s Bacchanale from Tannhäuser. The enchanted ocean dominates the music as the sea rises to engulf the island, leaving the immortals to ride the waves into the gathering dusk as everything fades out of sight. Debussy and his impressionism are never far away and La Mer is Bax’s obvious inspiration.

A series of tragedies affected Gerald Finzi profoundly as he grew older. His father died before he was eight, and by the time he was eighteen he had lost his three older brothers and a teacher he much admired, Ernest Farrar, who was killed in action. This dreadful sequence of adolescent events, against the backdrop of the World War I, gave Finzi the composer, an acute awareness of how short life can be and this was also underlined when at the age of fifty he became terminally ill with leukaemia. These early experiences, like similar ones that Mahler endured, are probably the cause of the underlying sense of melancholia in Finzi’s music, heard especially as here in Intimations of Immortality based on William Wordsworth’s ‘Recollections of Early Childhood’.

The music begins with an otherworldly horn call, representing the ‘intimations of immortality’ themselves and then Finzi excels with an instinctive feeling for the texts as everything is complemented almost perfectly by the musical lines. Both here and in the Bax music the BBC Concert Orchestra, not an ensemble one would most associate with the BBC Proms, played cleanly under Paul Daniel (replacing an ailing Vernon Handley). There were all the correct colourings and the tenor Andrew Kennedy (no relation to the Kennedy who would so dominate the second half of the concert) sang warmly and elegantly displaying a secure technique. The soloist and his orchestra were given valiant support from the BBC Symphony Chorus and typical of their contribution was sublime ‘O joy!’ entry to the ninth stanza. Later the same stanza the tenor supplied a typically fine unaccompanied and high ‘Of the eternal silence’.

Elgar dedicated his Violin Concerto in B minor to Fritz Kreisler, who was the soloist at its first performance in 1910, though he subsequently became disenchanted with the work. More intriguingly the score also carried the inscription: ‘Aqui está encerrada el alma de.....’ (‘Here is enshrined the soul of ...’) and this further Elgarian enigma is generally accepted to be a reference to Alice Stuart-Wortley, a close friend whom he nicknamed ‘Windflower’ and the obvious inspiration for the Concerto who assigned this name to two of its central themes.

So on came Nigel Kennedy only to have to tune up while someone found Paul Daniel’s score backstage. He was returning to the Proms after an absence of 21 years. There was too much fist clenching and saluting the audience and his spiky hair and shambolic appearance is a little passé now and he needs to grow up a bit. He is however a great ambassador for classical music and his ‘schtick’ is quickly forgotten as he is undoubtedly a very serious musician. To shouts of ‘Come on Nige!’ he threw himself into the Violin Concerto -  or ‘some Romantic English music’ as he called it  - with the gusto, appearance and even the initial sound of a gypsy violinist. This is music of impassioned lyricism and there could be no better interpreter I could imagine than Nigel Kennedy. Full of emotion the music is played with a warm, even tone with pristine articulation and phrasing. He may have been a little free with the rhythm as Paul Daniel appeared to be following his soloist rather than accompanying or leading him however secure the harmony appeared to be between them. Kennedy’s tone seemed to thin a little under pressure and then there is the occasional intrusive foot-stamping he does but this is just nit-picking. Throughout there was some exquisite quiet playing with wisps of sound that seemed just like mist rising from an English pasture at dawn.

For me the highlight of the Concerto is the spirited, even occasionally jaunty but extremely virtuosic finale. There is a passage featuring almost Wagnerian brass as it all begins with a dazzling abundance of themes and a great sense of urgency. Yet, with the end in sight, Elgar includes a one-of-a-kind cadenza that is the emotional climax of his whole Concerto. This extraordinary passage in Kennedy’s hands - accompanied throughout, apart from a brief moment near the end, by strings, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and timpani - is a brilliant musical study on recollections of and second thoughts on the earlier themes. It begins, as Elgar wrote himself, as the violin ‘sadly thinks over the first movement’.

Overall the performance was undoubtedly deeply-felt and Kennedy wore its Romantic heart on his jacket sleeve and thoroughly deserved the standing ovation he received from the packed Royal Albert Hall. Retuning his violin he commented on the disparate noises as ‘That’s one I learnt in Nashville’ before telling us ‘Let’s go over to the enemy and play a bit of German music’ and launched into a joyous, technically challenging unaccompanied Bach encore.

He said what a pleasure it was to play with such a ‘dynamically aware and chamber-feeling orchestra’ and he credited Paul Daniel for being open and without gimmicks. Finally he held up the conductor’s score and asked us - the audience - to ‘give credit to this geezer … Elgar!’ That he and we certainly do but for making the music live then we can only credit that ultimately to Kennedy himself.

Jim Pritchard


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