The long days wane, summer fades and sure enough, the big international guest orchestras begin to land at the BBC Proms. A rare catch this year was the Proms debut of the orchestra of the New York Metropolitan Opera, under its music director Yannick Nézét-Séguin. Debut? No, I couldn’t quite believe it either. What with the regular Radio 3 broadcasts from the Met, and all those live cinema relays, the Met Orchestra almost feels like part of the family. Certainly, there must be few overseas orchestras whose live performances are more familiar to British audiences.
No question, though, there’s always something rather festive about hearing a great opera orchestra in concert. Opera bands are the endurance athletes of the orchestral world, and they eat symphonic repertoire for breakfast (the entire duration of this Prom would barely take you into Act Two of Götterdämmerung). The Met Orchestra brought an all-Strauss programme, climaxing with Ein Heldenleben; a suitably epic hunk of late-romantic orchestral showmanship. Perfect.
But the first half was operatic, showcasing the Met players in music that they know as well as any orchestra on Earth. The soprano Elza van den Heever sang the closing scene of Salome and Nézét-Séguin opened with the deeply dodgy Rodzinski concert suite from Der Rosenkavalier: a medley of questionable provenance that Strauss definitely didn’t create but (being strapped for royalties after the unpleasantness of 1939-45) didn’t disown either. As a testcard of luscious sonorities, it did its job, even if it felt a bit early to be indulging in the little orgasms of the ‘Silver Rose’, or witnessing the Met horn section somersaulting through the hoops of the final waltz.
