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BBC Proms (20, 21) Royal Albert Hall, London & Tête à Tête, Riverside Studios, London

After the orchestral brawl, an intergalactic bunfight

George Hall
Sunday 10 August 2008 00:00 BST
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The Royal Albert Hall is an unpredictable space; you never quite know what will work there and what won't. Stockhausen Day, the Proms tribute to the late, great German composer, capitalised on the hall's communality, as well as its surprising capacity for intimacy.

The first event brought one of his signature works of the 1950s in the shape of Gruppen, with conductors David Robertson, Martyn Brabbins and Pascal Rophe leading sections of the BBC Symphony in a process of collusion and collision between three orchestras.

The climax, with three brass sections hurling volleys of sound at each other, catapulted the audience smack into the centre of some of the fiercest fighting of the modernist fray. Conversely it was the intricacy of Kontakte that pianist Nicolas Hodges, percussionist Colin Currie and sound projectionist Bryan Wolf revealed in their finely realised account. The world premiere of Harmonien – a fragment of Stockhausen's late, incomplete cycle Klang – offered a surprisingly melodic solo for trumpeter Marco Blaauw. But the most riveting of the concert's offerings turned out to be the purely electronic Cosmic Pulses, a 30-minute continuum of mighty and minute sounds ricocheting round the hall like some infinite, inter-galactic bunfight. Stockhausen's vast output is erratic, but the best is surely here to stay.

Down the road at the Riverside Studios, Tête à Tête launched their ambitious three-week festival of operatic counter-culture. With five events on opening night alone, there was no shortage of quantity. But the range of quality was more worrying.

Bounced around in a Zorb at the side of the venue as an al fresco pre-performance performance, Evangelia Rigaki's Bumblepuppy was a lightly humorous erotic-taster-in-progress.

Bellowed in the bar during a frenetic interval, Mike Henry's The Agony of the Knife Thrower's Assistant fought a losing battle with the clamour for Pinot Grigio. More substantial was Through Wood: The Violins Project, by librettist Alasdair Middleton and composer Joe Townsend, in which a dark exploration of the significance of the violin in Romany culture was undertaken with some pleasingly folksy lyricism.

Pruned by 15 minutes, it would have been twice as effective. Despite an engaging cello-and-patter turn by Matthew Sharp, Pete M Wyer's Johnny's Midnight Goggles was a children's story for adults that could have been cut altogether.

Best of the evening's offerings however, was the composer/singer/songwriter Errollyn Wallen's late-night cabaret, which comprised several natty extracts from her oeuvre, among them the super-subversive satire of Eva Braun's putative love song, "My Hitler". I'm still staggered that she got away with it; but she did.

The Proms (0845-401 5040) continue to 13 Sep. Tête à Tête (020-8237 1111) to 17 Aug

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