LONDON - Enough already with summer concerts of bourgeois pleasantry.

Although only a lumpen kind of proletarian himself, Thomas Ades to the
rescue.

His programming for tonight's BBC Proms: Finnish incest and suicide, a
French lament for the pending rape of a city, and Ades' own valentine to
America: may you all suffer the pains of the damned.

But here's the real news: one can put up with weight, substance, thought
and even tragedy - if it's well done.  By far, the worst thing in Albert
Hall tonight had nothing to do with the subject matter.

It was Ades butchering the Berlioz abominably.  Here's the supposed great
star of Britain's musical future, the multi-threat wunderkind - composer,
conductor, pianist - forcing the fine BBC Symphony Orchestra into a
shapeless mess, purportedly the Lament from the Prologue to "The Trojans
at Carthage" and worse, the Trojan March.

Given his first entire Proms concert to lead, Ades exhibited a languid,
uniform, unvaried, meaningless beat, just a bit less lively than the fabled
"a-one and a-two" of the sainted Lawrence Welk.  The result was awful,
although it could have been worse if the orchestra actually paid attention.

In the event, the orchestra forged ahead by itself in the program-opening
Sibelius, the lengthy, interesting, seldom-performed "Kullervo" but no
such luck with the combined choruses (from the Crouch End Festival and
the London Symphony).  Their crucial role in the oratorio - narrators
of the story from Finnish folklore and commentators on the tragic events
- was severely undermined by Ades' lack of conducting ability.

The story is grim: Kullervo (Kalervo's offspring, "old man's son
with blue-dyed stockings") is separated in childhood from his sister,
and when he meets him again, he seduces her, without knowing her identity.
Consumed by guilt, he ends his life.  The music is early Sibelius, from his
student days in Vienna in the 1890s, influenced by Bruckner, but clearly
his own.  The orchestral and choral writing already bear unmistakable signs
of the master (except for the strangely Italianate, Respighi-forerunner
conclusion), while the music for the two soloists is not of the same
quality.

Susan Bickley, an exceptional mezzo, and baritone Raimo Laukka made the
best of it.

Bickley also provided the surprise of the evening by shining brightly in
Ades' horrid little "America (A Prophecy)"

Bickley floated a pure, amazing sound above the silly orchestral noise,
making her part notable, almost in spite of the composer's intentions.
What were those intentions? To portray a nation as weak, guilty and fallen.
To warn America ("weak from fuck and drink") that the end is near, the just
"coming from the east. . . will burn all the land. . . all the sky."

These "good soldiers" will not expect anything in this world, "the reward
they will be given shall be that they will have in Heaven eternal glory."
In the musically most effective part of "America," the mezzo sings: "Burn,
burn, burn.  On earth we shall burn.  We shall turn to ash [which] shall
drift across the land. . .  Weep, but know this well: Ash feels no pain."

Is this just a horribly tasteless comment on 9/11? No, the really spooky
thing is that Ades wrote it on commission from the New York Philharmonic
as a "message for the millennium," and Kurt Masur conducted the New York
premiere on Nov.  11, 1999.

Unlike the bizarre story about it, the 15-minute piece itself is mostly
a pastiche, a running in place, looking for some cohesion or meaning.
At 31, Ades is no longer a kind, but his wunder is still on the "succes
de scandale" level of the loathsome "Powder Her Face."

Janos Gereben/SF
In Merry Old, to 9/1
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