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.It remains a mystery how differently UK audiences have been responding since the pandemic. While some concert halls and opera houses struggle with half-filled performances, others — notably the BBC Proms and Glyndebourne — say they are having their best seasons ever. The 2024 BBC Proms programme is the most appealing for a few years, but that does not explain how one of the world’s biggest venues for classical music can fill its 5,000-plus seats so often in the eight-week Proms season.A full house for John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London could admittedly have been expected. Wilson and his handpicked players have built up a sizeable reputation since the orchestra was relaunched in 2018; give them a showpiece and they will dazzle. Their Prom was an all-American affair: introduced by the jazz fanfares of Wynton Marsalis’s Herald, Holler and Hallelujah!, it brought together some iconic works of the American repertoire.The suite from Aaron Copland’s ballet Billy the Kid and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, with Steven Osborne the soloist, showed off the orchestra’s corporate flair. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, its distant trumpet solo coming from high in the gallery, called for hushed concentration.The main event was John Adams’s Harmonielehre (1985). If Adams had called this work his Symphony No 1, perhaps it would have commanded respect more quickly. In his straddling of German Romanticism and the American minimalists, Adams created a territory of his own, however much it passingly may recall other influences (is there even an echo of Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack to Hitchcock’s Vertigo?). Harmonielehre is much more than a showpiece, but the exemplary solo work and Wilson’s sharply etched rhythmic drive flaunted their excellence. Heard in the vast expanse of the Royal Albert Hall, this mighty work is a Proms knockout. ★★★★★Less predictable was a full house for Saturday’s Prom. No doubt Elgar’s Cello Concerto, elegantly played here by Finnish cellist Senja Rummukainen, can be relied upon to draw a crowd, but Holst’s choral work The Cloud Messenger, premiered in 1913, is a rarity that surely requires a sense of adventure.This was the first performance of the Holst at the BBC Proms. Based on the composer’s own adaptation of a Sanskrit poem, it aims to fuse the English choral tradition with Holst’s fascination for Hinduism. The problem is that the work comes after others by Holst, such as the opera Sāvitri and Rig Veda choral hymns, that invoke Hindu spirituality much more memorably. Too much here is disjointed, though the music ends in an extended passage of calm, beautifully realised by a well-rehearsed BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Sakari Oramo. Jess Dandy was the dignified contralto soloist. ★★★☆☆Two days later there was another rarity, Busoni’s giant Piano Concerto. The concerto has had one previous Proms outing, but with its huge orchestra and additional men’s chorus, not to mention a 70-minute duration, it is never going to be an everyday encounter.Here is the kind of rhapsodic, bombastic piano concerto that Liszt might have written, if he had not stopped at 20 minutes in those that he did write. The journey is like a wild and unpredictable climb to the summit of a mountain, from where rapt music invokes a vision of the eternal, men’s voices intoning from the gallery above, as if in Wagner’s Parsifal. Benjamin Grosvenor was the fearless pianist, racing up and down Busoni’s virtuoso cascades of notes with seemingly faultless precision. Edward Gardner led the London Philharmonic Orchestra in a rewarding performance of this indigestible monster, to the appreciation of another well-filled Royal Albert Hall. ★★★★☆To September 14, bbc.co.uk/proms
