Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.One of the virtues of the BBC Proms is the opportunity they give regional orchestras from around the UK to play in London. With eight weeks of concerts to fill, it is a case of all hands on deck. Orchestras from the BBC stable and others are welcome.For the Hallé, based in Manchester, this year’s Prom was a special occasion. After 25 years Mark Elder is stepping down as music director and a capacity Royal Albert Hall (around 6,000 including those standing in the arena and gallery) was on hand for a high-octane programme comprising a recent work by Sir James MacMillan and Mahler’s Symphony No 5.Macmillan’s 20-minute choral showpiece brought coach loads down from the north, probably as many as 400 performers. Receiving its first London performance, Timotheus, Bacchus and Cecilia sets sections of John Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, a poem of 1697. It starts promisingly — rumbling rhythms, flurries of woodwind, a bold, brassy call-to-attention, all vivid as always with MacMillan — but these early sections are too restless to establish a clear, defining character.That comes when Cecilia enters in a hallowed haze, introduced by an eloquent orchestral passage and haunting children’s voices. From there, MacMillan builds to a radiant conclusion, brass blazing and the combined forces of the Hallé’s Choir, Youth Choir and Children’s Choir, all excellent, joining in a hymn to the patron saint of music.After the interval the Mahler symphony showed what Elder and the Hallé have achieved together over those long years. It must have taken an age to rehearse every detail as scrupulously as this. The performance may have wanted the last ounce of abandon, but where some conductors are tempted to go for brash virtuosity, Elder was more rewardingly serious and unexaggerated. The famed Adagietto sang with a touching, restrained eloquence. At the end he gave a speech lauding the Hallé’s players and, more ominously, calling on “anybody concerned with the future of this festival” to espouse the Proms’ cause. Does he know something we don’t?★★★★☆Mahler’s Fifth dates from 1902 and the next night’s Prom paired two works from the same period, Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande and Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid). Both are also huge orchestral canvases, looking back to Wagnerian music drama but forward through the texts of Maeterlinck and Andersen to the burgeoning psychology of Freud. What a time: imagine these two composers, Freud and the Secession artists passing each other in the streets of Vienna.The BBC National Orchestra of Wales was ambitious in bringing a programme with the two together. In this concert the more conventional Zemlinsky, with its delicately atmospheric scene-painting, made a better impression than the anguished harmonic density of the Schoenberg.Both involve huge orchestras — eight horns in the Schoenberg, seven in the Zemlinsky — and the orchestra’s conductor, Ryan Bancroft, ensured well-balanced playing and a very effective mix of poetry and panache. It was one of BBCNOW’s best Proms outings of recent years.★★★★☆To September 14, bbc.co.uk/proms
