Pleasure at the Proms

Positively oceanic was the season’s principal novelty. It was not a new commission; rather, the rediscovery 440 years after its composition of the Mass in 40 parts by Alessandro Striggio, whose final Agnus Dei rises to a staggering 60, which ought to leave Tallis’s celebrated Motet (whose inspiration is reckoned to originate here) pale and gasping in comparison. Which is to hint already at disappointment. In the event (17 July) it was Striggio who paled. Even what one expected — an exploitation of spaces and masses in great planes of slow-shifting harmony — was curiously ordinary for such an extraordinary venture; almost completely devoid of the intricate finesse of the Tallis, and completely lacking the inspired shift that makes it the Boléro of the 16th century. One will remember better than Striggio’s music the absorbing tale of its reclamation, identified by the Renaissance scholar Davitt Moroney from a supposed Mass in four (!) parts by a fictitious ‘Fusco’, miscatalogued in various French libraries since 1726 and unheard since 1567. Tallis, concluding the concert, made the same point without words.

Three very distinctive and very different Proms yielded much reward and pleasure. I’ve often advocated in this column the joys of incidental music to plays long defunct or only given without such elaborate and expensive adornment. On 29 July the ‘musiciens du Louvre’ performed two: Bizet’s score for L’Arlésienne, not the familiar somewhat clodhopping suites for full orchestra, but the entire original with its many inspired extra cues all set within their proper dramatic contexts, for the small ensemble that elicits its composer’s surpassing delicacy.

The concert had begun with Fauré’s exquisite music for Shylock, another lost play (albeit based on The Merchant of Venice), where the gentle master’s tender eroticism glows at its brightest and clearest.