BBC Proms get under way with a concert of popular favourites — review

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This year’s opening night of the Proms did not go entirely according to the script. Before the first note had been played, a group of promenaders called for support for the BBC Singers, who were threatened with closure earlier this year under the BBC’s new strategy for classical music, though they are currently under a kind of reprieve. Then, just before the final work, a couple of Just Stop Oil protesters briefly invaded the platform. Cheers for the BBC Singers, boos for Just Stop Oil — the Proms audience showed where its loyalties lie.

It will have come as a relief that the music itself went off without a hitch, though the lack of ambition in the programme, a concert mainly of popular favourites, meant any challenge was a modest one.

That, regrettably, could be a description of the season as a whole. Nobody would want to argue against the widening of the appeal of the Proms — both in the tentative expansion to the regions and the embrace of other types of music, such as Broadway musicals, world, jazz and crossover — but that should not have to mean the core classical concerts losing their zing, as they have in recent years.

Great Proms of the past, such as the complete Wagner Ring cycles, the Beethoven symphonies under Daniel Barenboim, or “Stockhausen Day”, are no longer to be seen. The annual parade of the world’s top international orchestras has shrunk to a handful, and those not all from the first division. The Proms website describes it as “the world’s greatest classical music festival” but, as rival festivals like Lucerne power ahead, that is looking increasingly debatable.

On the opening night, there was at least nothing to dislike. Dalia Stasevska, the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Finnish principal guest conductor, was born in Ukraine and her programme brought together rousing music from both countries.

The concert opened with Sibelius’s Finlandia, performed in the version with a choir singing the patriotic “Finlandia Hymn”. The premiere of Bohdana Frolyak’s Let There Be Light, a BBC commission, promised a Ukrainian counterpart, “symbolising light that takes a path through darkness”, but did not go much beyond a generalised, widescreen film atmosphere. Paul Lewis was the warm-hearted soloist in Grieg’s Piano Concerto and Lesley Manville the narrator in another piece by Sibelius, his rarely heard, mythological Snöfrid, a moderately interesting find. Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, lively though it is, made rather small beer for a concert climax. The ever-ebullient Stasevska and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were joined for the evening by the BBC Symphony Chorus and — their last Proms season? — the excellent BBC Singers.

★★★☆☆

On Sunday morning, there was the pleasure of a rare solo piano Prom. Benjamin Grosvenor has the full armoury of technique and musicianship at his fingertips and there was never any doubt that he would command both the huge hall and the occasion.

Opening the recital with music as rarefied as an arrangement of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, made by Leonard Borwick, would have been risky if Grosvenor had not pitched volume and projection at just the right level for the hall. Liszt’s Réminiscences de Norma balanced some poetry against barnstorming climaxes. Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin offered Baroque elegance with a dash of impressionist enchantment and the dizzying cascades of notes in La valse delivered nothing short of a hair-raising whirl around the dancefloor to leave the audience breathless before lunch. Grosvenor is the real deal.

★★★★★

Season continues to September 9, bbc.co.uk/proms