‘I’ll pretend it’s me and my friends and we’re just chilling,” jokes Rebecca Lucy Taylor, better known as Self Esteem, admitting to feeling “quite nervous” at the start of her debut performance with a live orchestra. Behind her are the strings, horns, keyboards and percussion of the Royal Northern Sinfonia (RNS). In front of her, an audience are making a noise that conductor Robert Ames later compares to “a jet engine”. The whole thing is being recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3. No pressure.
The world’s largest classical music festival may still be synonymous with the Royal Albert Hall, but the fastest selling concert in Sage Gateshead’s history kicks off the Proms’ first ever festival weekend outside London. This year, the festival travels to towns including Aberystwyth, Great Yarmouth and Dewsbury. “This is the most ambitious thing we’ve done to date. We don’t want the Proms to just feel like a London festival,” says Proms director David Pickard. “When Sir Henry Wood started the Proms in 1895, the original mission was to bring the world of classical music to a widest possible audience. All we’re doing is reinterpreting that.”
The programme has been carefully curated in conjunction with the Sage, the result reflecting the north – Self Esteem is from Rotherham – and the way we now listen to music. The six concerts stretch from pop to classical to jazz to the now traditional Proms CBeebies concert, conceived to introduce younger children to the power of live music.
There is certainly no doubting that on Friday night, with the removal of most seating from Sage One, the atmosphere was one of increasing euphoria. Taylor sings about modern issues facing women, from self-worth to predatory men, with big choruses. The conductor/arranger Ames has worked also with Taylor Swift and Radiohead, and he and Taylor make an inspired pairing.
“Self Esteem’s acclaimed Prioritise Pleasure album has orchestral elements and leans towards left-field atonal sound,” Ames tells me backstage, and it is notable how he has ensured that the orchestra is an integral part of Self Esteem’s music, rather than a separate, added entity. The inventive arrangements emphasise the songs’ strength and the delicately beautiful strings allow Taylor and four female backing singers’ voices space to soar. Taylor sings George Michael’s Praying For Time for the first time live, but delivers it spellbindingly. If anyone has any lingering preconceptions about orchestral music being stuffy, they should surely be dashed as Taylor cheekily introduces the song Fucking Wizardry “here on the BBC”. The audience bark like dogs (a feature of her song I’m Fine) as increasing audience participation makes for a triumphant communal experience in the best tradition of the Proms.
Shortly afterwards, in the smaller Sage Two, British-Bahraini trumpeter/flugelhorn player Yazz Ahmed may seem a world away from Self Esteem. However, her songs inspired by “courageous women” and “lives lost crossing the Mediterranean for a better future” also tell a modern story, while her music, too, roams through genres, from jazz to Arabic to electronica.
Pickard might have seemed optimistic in hoping that people would come to see Self Esteem on Friday and stick around for Saturday night’s big classical event. However, prommers of all ages are here on Saturday to see the RNS demonstrate its mettle with some tempestuous Mozart before driving Brahms’ Symphony No 2 to a pulverising climax, which leads the woman behind me to exclaim: “So powerful. Ohh!”
Over coffee in the foyer, Sage’s managing director, Abigail Pogson, who grew up in Bridlington, Yorkshire, tells me that they tried to give the programme “a north-east feel, but not in a slavish way”. Saturday’s late-night choir concert reflects the region’s traditions of community and choral singing. The mesmeric combined voices of the Chorus of Royal Northern Sinfonia, Voices of the River’s Edge and Massed Voices of the North East rework nocturnally themed songs ranging from Elgar to Wagner to Laura Mvula’s Sing to the Moon and a stunning arrangement of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence.
More surprisingly, but delightfully, the acclaimed fusion clarinettist Arun Ghosh may be Calcutta-born, Bolton-reared and perform in an Indian kurta, but he peppers an emotional set with regional references. There is a song about the northern lights (Aurora) and a beautifully melancholic take on Geordie boy Mark Knopfler’s Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero). “Local songs for local people,” says Ghosh, grinning.
By Sunday, a theme has emerged of the ways music can connect us. Angel-voiced, Grammy-nominated countertenor Reginald Mobley and stellar French jazz pianist Baptiste Trotignon take us on a magical and deeply moving journey through the African American spiritual. They are timeless songs that have resurfaced everywhere from Woodstock to acid house and Moby, and Mobley’s powerful voice and obvious empathy make them sound fresh and impactful.
The main hall packs with tots as Royal Northern Sinfonia (led by the red-jacketed, broadly grinning and visibly enthusiastic conductor Kwamé Ryan) and the CBeebies Ocean Adventure reveal the secret sauce for turning under-fives on to environmental issues and live orchestral classical music: dolphins, whale song, lively TV presenters Chantelle Lindsay and Rory Crawford and much-loved cartoon characters JoJo and Gran Gran. Our 11-year-old is far too mature for this sort of thing now, but the inaugural regional Proms weekend notches up another convert when he says: “The best bit is definitely the music.”
• Listen to the concerts on BBC Sounds, all available until 8 October. Self Esteem; Reginald Mobley; Chorus of the RNS/Voices of the River Edge; Yazz Ahmed and Arun Ghosh and the Royal Northern Sinfonia with Dinis Sousa.
