At the Welsh Proms this week they’ve been selling copies of My Life In Music, the autobiography of the event’s founder and conductor, Owain Arwel Hughes.
I haven’t read it yet but there’s sure to be a section on the Proms, which have been tootling along nicely this week on route to the traditional Last Night.
The author may well have listed everything played by a symphony orchestra since the inaugural week of musical festivities in 1985, so he’ll have been reminded that old favourites keep appearing.
That’s because Welsh Proms concerts are essentially crowd-pleasers. It’s a simple formula: have crowd, will please it. Proms audiences never go home shaking their heads in confusion or disappointment.
Mr Hughes and one orchestra or another have certainly satisfied them with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto and Saint-Saens’s Organ Symphony more than once.
What he hasn’t done is even think of diminishing their pulling power, though the repeated outings for the St David’s Hall organ in the symphony do begin to seem like special pleading.
If that work’s a curate’s egg then the piano concerto would be a long-lasting sweet confection if the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and soloist Peter Donohoe had not been intent on giving it some formidable body and shape. Mr Donohoe is one of those pianists taken for granted in a business governed by the marketing potential of new prodigies on the block but his performance of the concerto on this occasion was emphatically big-hearted, the famous slow movement not the mushy raison d’etre but a grand design’s quiet corner.
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