BBC Proms Masterworks: Walton and Sibelius BBC Proms

We've all dreamt of it, of going out there on the Royal Albert Hall

stage and playing your favourite concerto.

Just think of the joy, and the terror,

of playing Rachmaninoff's

Third Piano Concerto for the Prommers.

That's just one of my musical Everests that's never,

ever going to come true, but for a couple of tonight's performers

that dream is their reality.

James Ehnes is the soloist in William Walton's Violin Concerto,

and we're also going to hear what's almost a mini-concerto for

cor anglais and orchestra by Jean Sibelius.

All that, and Thomas Sondergard conducts the

BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Sibelius's elemental Fifth Symphony.

But it's all about soloists facing their fears

and the faces of thousands of Prommers

on tonight's Masterworks at the Proms.

So the first of tonight's soloists is

James Ehnes and he and his Stradivarius met me

earlier today before his rehearsal to talk about his long

relationship with William Walton's Violin Concerto.

It's a piece I fell in love with as a teenager.

I had a recording of Heifetz playing it and I just thought,

"This piece is the best." And I couldn't understand why

it didn't seem to be more mainstream repertoire.

-And then I learned it and it all became clear.

-What's the reason?

It's a very challenging piece.

Not just for the violinist but for the orchestra,

for the conductor, it's really virtuosic for everybody.

So how do your hands deal with it, then?

I have to think about trying to play as beautifully as possible.

And thinking of the lyrical lines and trying to consider that to a lot

of people in the audience this is not going to be a piece that they know.

So, it's a special opportunity for me

to introduce something that means a lot to me.

Can you give us an example of that lyricism?

Sure. The very first opening melody is just lush and beautiful.

HE PLAYS OPENING MELODY

-Magic.

-It's great, isn't it?

It's got a little bit of that almost Hollywood quality to it.

There's something very atmospheric.

The second movement, the presto scherzo, starts with

a Tarantella because Walton was supposedly bitten by a tarantula.

It's a funny thing with back stories of pieces.

Because you can sort of make of it what you want.

I don't think that an appreciation of the piece depends on that

but definitely this alla Neapolitana, I guess,

it played a role in the composition.

And certainly has that feel.

The opening of that second movement is just fun.

HE PLAYS OPENING OF SECOND MOVEMENT

Neat stuff. It's fun to play.

How do you think it will speak to this audience, then?

And do you have a sense that when you got to the end of a performance

of this piece whether the audience is falling in love with it?

I can never second guess the audience but I know

when I first heard the piece I fell in love

so I think if there are people out there like me and

if I can play it well, then hopefully it will gain a few new fans.

-James, thank you very much.

-Thank you.

APPLAUSE

MUSIC: "Violin Concerto" by William Walton

MUSIC STOPS

INAUDIBLE

MUSIC RESUMES

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MUSIC RESUMES

APPLAUSE

It always amazes me. This is such a huge space the Royal Albert Hall.

4,500 to 5,000 people, how ever many there are here tonight,

all focusing in on the smallest sound that you'll hear

in the whole Proms season.

James Ehnes solo violin playing

Sir William Walton's Violin Concerto.

Surely, that was the performance to make you fall in love with

that piece if you weren't already.

James was telling me about its Hollywood lyricism and there

were moments of real soaring passion in that performance,

but never ever a trace of sentimentality

in James Ehnes's performance.

But we're going to hear music that would have been the overture

to an opera by Sibelius on Finnish folk legend.

His magnificently concise tome poem, The Swan of Tuonela.

Now, it's based on the story of the hero Lemminkainen's

journey to the Kingdom of Death, where he tries to kill the swan that

is swimming on the black river. He fails and is instead killed himself.

The sounds that this music makes are magical and mysterious,

slow and strange.

And they're also dependant upon another of tonight's soloists.

This time from within the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Cor anglais player Sarah-Jane Porsmoguer.

It's haunting.

The sound of the cor anglais is haunting and quite dark

and there's nothing like it anywhere else in the orchestra, I don't think.

Is it difficult, technically, for you to do? It's not very fast.

This is very slow music so it's not showy virtuosity

but what do you need to do as a player to pull this music off?

Because it is such a slow piece

if it's played too slowly it sounds like the swan is treading water,

and he's got his foot stuck, and he's not going anywhere.

Likewise, if it's just going too fast he doesn't sound menacing enough.

So, yeah, the pulse has to be right.

But then I find there has to be different intensities within the

-music because of the story.

-So, how do you think of it personally then?

The drama of the piece?

For me I see the first two entrances of the cor anglais as somebody

viewing the island.

And the strings are pictorial.

They're showing us how the island feels

and what it looks like with the black river.

Then the third entry, I see that as the swan swooping in.

"Here I am, I've got a story to tell you.

"Be careful. You're not going to get away from here alive."

And the next bit I see as the young man who's being killed

and he's floating underwater.

You know, the films where somebody's just floating?

It's an undershot of the camera and the sun's shining down.

That's how I see it.

And then when we've got the pizzicato strings,

I see that as the mother picking up the pieces of her son,

and then my final entry I see as a sort of funeral march.

APPLAUSE

MUSIC: The Swan of Tuonela by Sibelius

APPLAUSE

Existential loneliness in just a few minutes.

Of course, The Swan of Tuonela was made by Sarah-Jane Porsmoguer's

cor anglais playing

but also by the effect that Sibelius creates in the whole orchestra.

There was chills of bass drum and the string lines that slide up

from the double basses to the top of the first violins.

For the final piece in tonight's programme, more Sibelius.

His Fifth Symphony.

Now, the focus here isn't on individual players

but rather on the whole ensemble of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

However, it's going to require something

special from tonight's conductor, Thomas Sondergard.

The thing about this piece is for any conductor

attempting its three movements they must be a soloist of space and time,

manipulating this music's gigantic energies and dimensions.

And there are a couple stand out moments, challenges really,

for the conductor to deal with.

I want to find out how Thomas is going to negotiate

the first movement.

It's propelled by a huge, five minute long process of speeding up.

So how's he going to do it?

If you can imagine you blow on the water, you see the effect of it

and you make sure that you don't stop the rings in the water.

-The ripples, OK.

-Yeah. If I can put it that way.

Because it's not only me doing it.

It must feel very natural for the musicians.

For example, a little later where there's a trumpet solo here.

Let's... D. Let's not have a naturando for these eight bars.

-OK.

-But it's a thing I realised after many years.

Because, in a way, we agree that we all push a little bit forward.

But some things lie natural in a way that, "Let me just play this

"and then we'll go on again."

Do you have to consciously, sort of, drive the players forward?

They're watching very closely. They sure are.

Because it's not going to happen in the same place all the time.

It could be in those chromatic places.

HE SINGS NOTES

That then connects with what happens in the third movement.

Again, you've got this moment. Pocotino stretto.

At the very end of the symphony, it's getting faster,

but the process is a kind of gigantic slowing down, actually.

It is as if you get towards these white nature scenery,

where you've not really noticed where you walk.

You just take it all in and suddenly you come to this steep cliff

and the music just stops.

And you realise through those six chords at the end that if I've just

-stepped a little further forward, that would be it.

-You'd fall off.

Yeah.

You take the music so much in at the end of the symphony,

so that you forget where you are.

In these six chords, then,

here's the first three of them and here's the last three,

your job is to make sure the music doesn't go off the cliff

so how do you control that?

Because, after all, you're not controlling sound here,

you're controlling silence, in a way.

I must have the courage, not necessarily to count

the beats in between, but to definitely have the calmness

to believe that the pause can be wide, it can be long.

If we want to come back to the picture I had before,

it's not that I use it when I conduct, necessarily.

There must be a reflection of what happened if I just took another step.

And it's a very original idea of Sibelius, I think.

Because it's easy that it could have come over to a very romantic ending.

But the danger is these are randomly spaced.

There's this chord and then five beats. Then there's six beats.

There's a kind of random thing.

The obvious thing to do would be to go one, two, three, four.

You're not going to be moving through this.

-How do you physically control that?

-It's inside.

It's not outside. I must believe that they all think the same way I do.

This is where it's really important,

that the conductor and the orchestra thinks the same way.

MUSIC: "Fifth Symphony" by Sibelius

MUSIC STOPS

MUSIC RESUMES

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APPLAUSE

-It stopped.

-Yeah. It didn't fall off the cliff. You're still intact?

-Not quite.

-Fantastic.

-Did you like the end?

-Absolutely.

No, physically but again you're holding everything.

It's the thing where you feel the thing moving

and yet it's still at the same time.

The question I want it ask is

if you're at the edge of the cliff, what do you see?

What is the view where we are?

Because you feel it's such a cosmic thing as a listener.

It's hard to describe because it's not so much...

-I don't think so much in pictures when I'm there.

-Sure.

To describe it to you when we met earlier is a different thing

but when you're there it's the context of the notes

and not least this is why we love doing what we're doing.

It's the atmosphere in the hall that you somehow...

..extend. Is that what you call it?

It's as if it has no fundament but the atmosphere is up there.

It's amazing.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

-All the best.

-Thank you.

It's a wonderful thing that because think about the idea of what

a conductor does as a sort of manipulation of space and time.

In a way, at the end of that symphony, all of those things

come together. It's like a kind of musical black hole.

Sibelius had this thing where he contains so much energy

and yet it's compressed down.

So you feel in that final chord that actually the whole

experience of this symphony,

the half hour before was squashed down into that singularity.

It's... Yeah... This is music as a kind of real physical experience.

The stuff of the universe, maybe.