Proms on Four: 20th Century Classics - BBC Symphony Orchestra BBC Proms

In this second Sunday from the Proms, death,

faced, feared, transcended and even celebrated in what, for me,

is one of the highlights of the whole Proms season.

Ahead of us, a Danse Macabre, a requiem for peace,

and a cello concerto that pits a solo cello

against the might of the full orchestra,

a work composed at the heart

of one of the century's most seismic political struggles.

The concert climaxes with the world premiere of Thomas Ades'

Totentanz - Dance of Death -

a piece specially commissioned for this year's Proms

and that the brilliant composer himself will conduct

at the Royal Albert Hall with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Before that, two dark, dazzling, dramatic pieces

close to Ades' heart,

by two composers who share a centenary this year -

Witold Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto,

and Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem.

Thomas Ades joins me here at the appropriately atmospheric

Highgate Cemetery to talk about all of the music on his programme,

starting with Benjamin Britten's wartime plea for peace.

Well, it's powerfully a wartime piece.

Sinfonia da Requiem is about death, it's about violence,

death which, of course, when he wrote it, was around in a terrible way.

In 1939 when he composed it.

Yes. Of course, the second movement is Totentanz,

a dance of death itself,

and is particularly...vivid, and towards the end of it,

it really is as though the canvas of the piece is being torn apart,

the whole orchestra in unison.

It's really a kind of...

..very violent piece of Britten.

Do you feel the force of meaning in this music,

that it's a cry about peace,

a cry for pacifism, a cry against war?

I always think that when you hear things like the saxophone solos

in the piece, it reminds me very much

of the sort of work that in painting Francis Bacon

was doing at the time, these sort of wraithlike figures.

It has this extraordinary expressive power,

at once fragility and violence, in the two extremes.

He was a young guy of 26, 27,

of strong political, pacifist convictions.

Does that mean...is that one reason you think that this is,

if not THE most, then among the most direct orchestral music

-that Britten EVER wrote?

-Yes, it's incredibly precocious. And thrilling.

Of course, war is a subject he returned to

many times in the course of his life, but there's something, to me,

I can tell this has sprung very freshly from his pen.

It's really inspired. And also brilliant control of the music.

It's not a mess. It's an extremely concise piece, actually.

How does it feel to conduct this piece?

Is it a piece that works well when you're up there giving it

to the orchestra, making it work with an orchestra?

Oh, well, it's quite masterly in the way it's constructed

and put together, and it's a pleasure to hear the amazing

structures he's made become real under one's hands.

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Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem at the Proms.

Thomas Ades conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Thomas Ades is with me in Highgate Cemetery.

Look, the next piece we're going to hear

is by another composer who was born in 1913

and who, in fact, wrote music

for Benjamin Britten's partner, Peter Pears.

This piece, though, is Witold Lutoslawski,

the Polish composer's Cello Concerto

that he wrote in 1970

for the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

Look, Tom, this piece seems to be about an individual,

sometimes a rather fragile individual,

against an often very violent mass.

I think it's clearly an opposition that's in the piece.

The opening solo is very long,

and it does feel like hearing somebody's thoughts,

and it starts with a heartbeat or a breath, or just this rhythm.

And it seems to be quite skittish and sort of capricious

and will go anywhere it wants.

The orchestra, Lutoslawski describes it

as being invited to join in by the cellist,

and it is actually linked to what he's just played,

but it is really hard to hear it as anything other than an interruption.

Four sections in the piece.

It starts with that repeated D in the cello,

which is marked in...

the most amazing mark in this - indifferente, indifferently,

so the cellist is almost asked to play...

I don't mean bored, but asked to play indifferently.

Yes, it's not supposed to be thought about.

It's just something that happens like a breath or walking, I think.

I think that's fairly clear, yeah.

But there's then a song, a cantilena in the piece.

Yes, there's a brilliant slow movement, wonderful.

And then there's a tremendous, uh... section

where the cello is pitted against the full orchestra,

and it unleashes its full impact.

And a wonderful part that I like to think of as the ghost train,

where he just plays and plays, and I have to catch various cues

and point to people who almost pop out like skeletons,

you know, like in a ghost train,

sort of...interrupt, try to interrupt,

try to stop him, and they can't stop him,

and then finally there's this tremendous guillotine-like,

repeated ten times, chord,

which does actually finish that off, that section.

It's very powerful.

Is it a piece you've learned from as a composer?

I, actually, was very lucky,

when I was at Guildhall School of Music,

I must have been about 17,

and Lutoslawski came and conducted as the invited composer.

He conducted the Cello Concerto

with Louise Hopkins, uh... playing the cello.

And I played the orchestral piano part,

and that's when I first heard the piece,

and of course it was... I completely fell in love with it.

APPLAUSE

Here is Witold Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto at the Proms.

Have a look on Twitter

for Lutoslawski's own guide to the concerto

from a letter he wrote to the work's dedicatee, Mstislav Rostropovich,

live on Twitter.

Paul Watkins, the cello soloist,

and Thomas Ades conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

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CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Witold Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall.

Paul Watkins was the soloist,

and Thomas Ades conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

SUSTAINED APPLAUSE

CHEERS AND APPLAUSE

SOME LAUGHTER

More Lutoslawski!

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SUSTAINED APPLAUSE

The final piece in this Prom is by Thomas Ades himself,

the world premiere of Totentanz,

an existential battle between life and death

that's played out between two singers,

Simon Keenlyside and Christianne Stotijn.

Simon sings the part of the macabre, the gleefully macabre Grim Reaper,

who takes the lives of the cavalcade of characters

that Christianne sings,

everyone and everything from a pope to a newborn babe,

from an emperor to a handworker.

But look, Totentanz, I mean, it's based on a German medieval frieze,

which you have an image of in front of us here,

that was originally in Luebeck and then destroyed in the war.

It was a huge cloth hanging

that went round the entire Marienkirche in Luebeck,

made in about...in 1463.

And it was very deteriorated by the early 18th century.

In 1701, they did a new one with new text.

Then it was indeed bombed, a huge firestorm on Palm Sunday 1942,

during the Second World War.

A lot of Luebeck was destroyed at that point.

Even from the start here,

there's something in the paintings already theatrical, musical.

I mean, look, here's Death kicking us off with the hat and the pipes.

The dance of death is not an optional dance, that's what it is.

It's the one dance that we all have to dance.

It's supposed to be at the same time, you know, terrifying,

levelling - you know, everybody is equal, no-one can escape it.

And also, it's funny, it's absurd.

And the thing that makes it funny is the total powerlessness of everybody,

no matter who they are.

The point is, Tom,

Death has absolutely the same ineluctable attitude to everyone.

You meet the human race

in strictly descending order of importance at the time.

-So you begin with the Pope, who was the top.

-Yeah.

And you end with the baby.

This is the box that he says he's going to put the Pope in.

He says to the Pope,

"Your hat's too tall, you're going to have to live in a narrower space."

That's what he says here.

The baby, which is the last one, is actually everybody, you know.

Even the Pope started as a baby, so the baby is kind of everyone.

Do you have more or less sympathy for some of the characters?

Well, I think Death definitely has more or less sympathy.

He has got very little time for the middle classes, I'm afraid,

for the mayor, that is, the doctor,

the...the merchant, the usurer, these kind of people.

He swats them like flies, very quickly.

-And we hear that in the piece, dealt with fairly quickly?

-Yes.

Then you have the peasant,

who is the only one that Death really likes, I think,

and they have a rather... the duet, a sort of harmonious thing.

So, look, at the very end, then...

Here's the peasant, who is really kind of arm in arm with Death.

-He's really enjoying this one.

-Yes.

And this is Death and the Maiden, as in the Schubert, that's it.

And here's the little... in his cradle.

Tom, how do you turn all this into a single piece of music?

Do all of the 15 human beings

have a different kind of musical characterisation?

The first human to sing, which is the Pope,

has a completely different sound from the music that Death sings to him.

He - she - sings against all of the violins and violas

that play freely without me... any conducting

in a sort of freefall.

And in a way, the humans' music,

quite a lot of them are a bit related to each other.

Not all, but there is a kind of thread that goes through.

Some of them, they sing in duet,

some of them are very much a panel, Death and then the human.

And some of them are sort of dialogues,

almost like a row or something.

Has it changed your thinking about mortality and death,

-writing this piece?

-No, no.

It wouldn't matter if it had - it's not going to change anything, is it?

HE LAUGHS That's the point of the piece!

APPLAUSE

The world premiere of Thomas Ades' Totentanz,

his Dance of Death, at the BBC Proms.

The composer himself conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra

at the Royal Albert Hall.

That piece was commissioned by Robin Boyle, the ex-head of Faber Music, Thomas Ades' publisher,

in memory of Witold Lutoslawski and his wife, Danuta.

The soloists were the wickedly macabre Simon Keenlyside as Death

and Christianne Stotijn, who took the roles of all us sinners,

from the emperor to the maiden

and the little child at the very end of the piece.

"I cannot walk, yet I must dance!"

None of us will escape.

As the preacher put it right at the start of the work,

"Though every man would live for ever, no-one can."

APPLAUSE CONTINUES

That's all for this Sunday's Sounds of the Century at the Proms.

And what on earth could follow that anyway?

Every Prom is live on BBC Radio 3.

The next one you can see on television is on Thursday on BBC Four,

when Daniel Harding conducts the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in music by Mozart, Schumann and Sibelius.

I'm back next Sunday with music that faces, and faces down,

one of the most oppressive regimes of the 20th century,

Dmitri Shostakovich's 11th Symphony.

Now, at the symphony's premiere in Moscow in October 1957,

his son, Maxim, turned to him and said, "Papa, what if they hang you for this?"

Join me next Sunday.

HE WHISTLES "ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE"

Subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing by Red Bee Media Ltd