In 1871, Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall to pay tribute to her late husband, Prince Albert. This morning’s BBC Proms concert pays homage to the opening seasons of 1871 and 1880 with music inspired by the opening concerts almost 150 years ago. Sitting on the organ bench today was Westminster Abbey’s (previously St Paul’s Cathedral’s) sub-organist, Peter Holder. However, Holder is not new to the proms; his first debut was in 2019, where he performed Janá?ek’s Glagolitic Mass on its opening night.

The concert opened with Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Coronation March from his grand 1849 opera Le prophète. While listening to this stately march, I found myself lamenting that Meyerbeer’s operas are rarely performed nowadays. Nevertheless, with all of the organ stops drawn out, I was moved by the works imperial and palatial character.

No organ recital is complete without J.S. Bach, or so they say. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue followed in a more reposed style. Holder chose a combination of quieter stops for the Fantasia, which was highly effective; it allowed one to adjust oneself to the complex eccentricities of Bach’s complex contrapuntal writing.

Moving forward 200 years, Charles-Marie Widor’s Allegro Vivace from his Symphony No. 5 followed. Most may recognise the infamous final toccata movement, notably played at weddings during the bride’s departure. However, Holder executed this opening movement with dynamism and vigour. His agility shone mid-way through where he drew the organ’s flute stops demonstrating Widor’s delicate but tortuous melodic writing. The work ends with a triple f, or ‘as loud as you can go’. Colloquially, the organist is forbidden to draw all of the stops at once at the Royal Albert Hall, as it is said to damage the brickwork due to the vibrations!

Now, onto what I was most looking forward to hearing; the Fantaisie No. 1 in Eb by the French 20th-century composer Camille Saint-Saëns. The Albert Hall organ was built in a ‘British orchestral’ style and is thus not commonly suited to French romantic organ music with heavy French diapasons and nasal reeds. Nonetheless, Holder performed the music of this centenary composer with much deftness. The highlight of this piece was the cadenza passage before the final few chords, where each hand plays the same notes by an octave apart. With the Albert Hall’s considerable acoustic, Holder managed to articulate every note so that the audience could precisely hear what Saint-Saëns had to say.

The final work in the programme was Franz Liszt’s infamous work Fantasia and Fugue on the plainchant ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem undam’. The longest piece in the programme by a whole 20-minutes, this work was best saved to the end. Often considered one of the most challenging works in the organ repertoire, with its fast-changing harmonic progressions and dexterous melodic runs, Holder performed the piece with an incredible amount of ingenuity. The work has passages that are much akin to the organ writing of Charles-Marie Widor, whom we heard earlier, and the aesthetic of the two composers placed in the same programme created a noticeable synergy. Before the work ends, Holder managed to show off the organ’s Tuba Mirabilis stop, the loudest solo stop on the organ. Overwhelmed by the turbulence of the sound, Holder received a much-deserved standing ovation, followed by an invitation from the audience to play an encore, which he unfortunately declined.

What an extraordinary end to the concert; I am sure that this will not be the last time we see Peter Holder at the BBC Proms over the coming years!

Matthew Geer

This concert presented High Romanticism in several guises. And that meant lots of emotion and more beautiful melodies than you could shake a stick at – all under the baton of a holistically inclined conductor who places the music centre stage rather than resorting to showy, look-at-me gesturing.

We began with the angry majesty of Beethoven’s Coriolan interspersed with passages of gossamer lightness before the most dramatic of pianissimo endings – a fine performance of an old favourite which still managed to sound fresh and interesting.

The central work was Schumann’s piano concerto which written for and premiered by his wife, Clara, in the early 1840s. Kirill Gerstein played it like a glorious duet with orchestra. In the first movement, for example, his incisive A minor rippling was perfectly punctuated with orchestral interjection with Bychkov paying loving attention to every nuance, The delicacy of dialogue between piano and orchestra was like an intimate conversation in the middle movement too.

A big orchestra like the BBC Symphony Orchestra, on this occasion spaced out 2021-style, somehow filters the sound so that you hear everything separately and clearly. Sometimes that feels a bit disparate but here it brought out to good effect elements such as the horn entries in the first movement and the clarinet continuo in the second.

Gersteins’s encore was a virtuosic delight too. I was expecting a jazz piece because that’s his other field of interest. In the event we got a Bussoni transcription of a Bach chorale. Only the (very) nimble fingered need apply – but Gerstein made it sound effortless.

And so, finally, with Mendelssohn to Scotland for an intelligent performance of the delightful third symphony. High spots included the clarinet solo in the second movement, a deliciously crisp Allegro vivacissimo and a rousing maestoso at the end with lovely horn work.

For me, though, the crowning glory was the third movement, the adagio. Based as it is round one of the most sublime melodies ever written it is all too easy to wallow. Bychhov, however, knows exactly how to make it movingly, poignantly tuneful without ever descending to gush – even when we get to the simple account of the melody on the horn.

I left the Royal Albert Hall, my head happily rattling with Mendelssohn, and pondering the current problems orchestral players have to grapple with. When are we going to stop this rule about not allowing string players to share a desk? From my seat in Block H, I could almost read the music on the back first violin stands. Much evidence of tedious photocopying, pasting and stapling lay thereon in order to make the page turns work. I think it’s time to get back to normal.

Susan Elkin

Sir John Eliot Gardiner is, quite literally an inspiration. He breathes music into his players and singers with wondrous results. As someone said to me afterwards it would have been worth the ticket price just for the Conquassabit passage in Handel’s Dixit Dominus – with its dramatic announcement pause and then a whole series of superbly articulated, staccato entries. It was an edge of the seat moment. And Sir John achieves all this without fuss or flamboyance – just fluidity of the wrists, mouthing the words and the unfussy force of personality. This, astonishingly, was his 60th appearance at the Proms.

The concert began with Handel’s Donna, che in ciel, an early cantata probably written in 1707 for a thanksgiving service to mark Rome’s having escaped damage from the terrible 1703 earthquakes in central Italy. It was new to me, and I suspect, to many of the Proms audience. Scored for solo alto (Ann Hallenberg in this performance) and string orchestra it has some very memorable sections such as the simple but mesmerising Tu sei la bella. Hallenberg, who can scoop out wine-dark low notes as well as sailing gloriously through high ones, found drama, passion and excitement in the piece. Some of it went so fast – Sorga pure dall’irrodo averno, for instance – that it was almost like a Rossini patter song and I was struck, yet again, by the innate musicality of the Italian language. Handel contrasts these passages with lyrical legato ones and Hallenberg compelled you to pay attention to every note.

And then we turned to Bach for Christ lag in Todes Banden, This, like Donna, che in ciel, was written in 1707. With a neat parallel, both composers were 22 that year. As for the opening work, Eliot Gardiner had violas on the outside with cellos at 2 o’clock from the rostrum. After a momentarily ragged start we were bombarded with contrasts and ideas including some delightful chorus duets between different sections. The basses bringing warm passion to the long dark brown notes echoing out over the strings in Hier ist das rechte Osterlamm was a particular high spot.

After the interval Handel’s Dixit Dominus was much more familiar territory and the orchestra had moved round with second violins now on the outside and soloists emerging from within the ranks of the choir. It was a treat to hear it sung with such sensitivity and panache – anyone who’s ever tried to sing Dixit Dominus in, say, a local choral society will know just how difficult it is with so many subsections and rapid passages interspersed with lyricism (was Messiah already in Handel’s head?) but this performance was masterly.

Apart from the arresting Conquassabit moments to treasure included Julia Doyle and Emily Owen (and chorus) singing De Torrente in via bibet with such vibrant emotion that Eliot Gardiner gave it to us a second time as an encore in acknowledgement of the rapturous applause at the end.

On a trivial note, understated as Sir John Eliot Gardiner is, he clearly doesn’t mind a tiny touch of tasteful, theatrical fun. I loved the scarlet cuffs on his velvet jacket which moved, fell and caught the light as he conjured all that magic with his hands.

Susan Elkin