Between the vast audience armed with mobile phones and the acoustic quirks of its cavernous dome, the Royal Albert Hall can be a tough place to conjure a musical spell. The Hallé should know, having appeared at the Proms most years since the 1950s. Under their longstanding music director Mark Elder, this year’s programme was nonetheless all about orchestral atmospherics.
At times, it worked. As Elder launched into the opening oh-so-mysterious pizzicati of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the lights went down, there was electric suspense that even the crackle of a steward’s walkie talkie couldn’t shatter. Every ping, shiver, slither and parp of the score’s bag of tricks was present and correct. There was showstopping contrabassoon playing from Simon Davies and more high-gleam polish than a car salesroom. But I missed a sense of fun amid the precision.
Respighi’s Fountains of Rome is a sparkling orchestral showcase. Elder played it cool and crystalline: woodwind solos were limpid, the brass sound gloriously copper-bottomed and the strings lush but never luxuriated. Every transition was taut, Elder entirely in control, until he released his grip, hands floating upwards, as the final bell chime dissipated.
And then there was Puccini’s brutal one-acter Il Tabarro – a romantic tragedy played out against the industrial backdrop of the Seine – in only its second ever Proms outing. As the troubled couple Michele and Georgetta, Lucio Gallo and Natalya Romaniw were vocally well matched and dramatically compelling, both voices able to hold their own against Puccini’s big, colour-drenched orchestra. Adam Smith’s Luigi (Michele’s romantic rival) was at times underpowered, while Annunziata Vestri’s cartoonish Frugola seemed to have walked out of an entirely different performance.
But the orchestra is the crux of this opera’s ambience. The brass provided a foundation full of grit and imaginative use was made of Royal Albert Hall’s huge spaces, with distant voices and solo instruments scattered around. The periodic interventions of two extraordinarily loud offstage boat horns were less successful. Puccini loved sound effects and these appear in his score – but they’re marked “distant”. This was definitely a case where less would have been more.
