Tom Service of the “Guardian” ´s New Music is no mean daw;
His Guardian contributions on New Music are close to heroic.
Why ? In a desert of the media he risks. He comments and sketches and , lastly, leads us to the newest Lindberg, say, or why we should skirt obliquely a Saariaho, a Salonen ( – yes, my heart and bush are voting these some years for Finns. Oh woe is me , an Irish orchestral composer …. More, no doubt , of this – well- later …. ). Meanwhile I bask in Guardian Tom Service´s flick of the music-journalist´s pen : ” Bantok ” but –
nobody´s fault actually – but NEVER Bartók .
The pieces you’ll hear at the Proms – from the Sapphic Poem, a langorously meandering blend of cello concerto and tone poem that Raphael Wallfisch plays on 24 July to the Sea Reivers on the Last Night, a discarded scherzo from the Hebridean Symphony – give a generous summary of the luxurious but easily digestible range and reach of Bantock’s orchestral imagination: think colourful Wagnerian harmony with a dash of Celtic modality and a soupçon of Rimsky-inflected flair and you’ll be on the right track. Best of all the Proms pieces, I think, is The Witch of Atlas, a tone-poem that Vladimir Jurowski will conduct with the London Philharmonic on 30 August, which Bantock wrote in 1902. That’s the earliest of the works we’ll hear at the Proms; the latest is one of Bantock’s most famous orchestral pieces, his Celtic Symphony for string orchestra and the mythic-bardic strains of no fewer than six harps. What would already have sounded like an elegy for a lost idyll in Bantock’s youth must have seemed almost unbearably nostalgic by the time the Celtic was composed and first performed in the early 1940s.
Bantock’s long life (born in 1868, he died in 1946) put him at the centre of British musical life, teaching at the University of Birmingham for 26 years, and helping to found the orchestra that would become the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (one of the first pieces they performed in 1920 was Bantock’s overture Saul). Yet his music never strayed far from the territory of wistful romanticism that he had found by the turn of the century. The suite of performances at the Proms gives us the chance to hear how much more there is to Bantock than dreams of Celtic duskiness and warmed-up Wagnerism.