At first glance, I was'nt too sure of the programme at all. Infact, really, I did'nt think be my scene. how wrong I was. Just goes to show.

The playing was really quite fantastic. One person in TOP, thought the orchestra(the BBCSO), was rather stifled!!. Just shows what and how music can be interpretated by different individuals.

The Grosse Fugue, was probably the best performance I have ever heard! I've never warmed to this piece until last night's performance. Both conductor(David Robertson) and the BBCSO were on fine form. They seem to be a very good team

The Elliot Carter piece was the one that really did put me off this Prom. I am not usually a fan of this composer but on the performance of his Oboe Concerto, I was amazed at the way the composer had written this piece. What a tour de force for the oboist, Nicholas Daniel, who looked really worn out! He surmounted all the obstacles that EC had put before him.

Beethoven 5th was  by no means an ordinary run of the mill performance either. This conductor and orchestra made it sound so fresh, it was quite amazing to find another to top this airing.

The orchestra and conductor were at one with each other, as if telepathy were at play with them They knew exactly what DR wanted and DR received what I would say was a well deserved adulation at the end.

It is! and I would imagine a lot more of its teeming details would be audible on the radio than in the RAH (especially given the fact that it's written for a very small orchestra). This is one of the pieces that I would for many years cite as one of the reasons I didn't like Carter's music, having heard Heinz Holliger (for whom it was written) play it at the QEH in 1988 or so and finding it horribly grey and arbitrary, but about ten years later I attended a revelatory concert of Carter's music at the Concertgebouw conducted by Oliver Knussen (of whom I am no fan at all!) in which everything suddenly made sense to me. It was probably to a great extent a case of my having reached a point where I could appreciate it. (I have of course taken on an increasingly grey and arbitrary appearance myself in the meantime.)

Not that I'd want my previous post to be interpreted as any kind of slight on Heinz Holliger's oboe playing! And I don't remember who the conductor was back then. Anyway, yes, I think I'd have to agree about Knussen and Carter.

I couldn't disagree more. Every performance/recording of Carter by Knussen I've heard sounds thoroughly calculated, antiseptic, impersonal, self-conscious to the extent that it becomes little more than an anoraky collection of patterns and sound, void of any emotional content I can perceive (I don't count the equally calculated use of certain mannered forms of 'expressivity'). Almost every detail I could predict, which I definitely wouldn't say of the Carter performances of Gielen, Boulez or even Barenboim (not being much of a fan of the latter); or, for that matter, those by either the Juilliard or Arditti Quartets, or Rosen, or various others. Rather like hearing jazz transcribed note for note and then played back verbatim. Not untypical amongst a certain school of British performance, though (lacking a notion of subjectivity that goes beyond simply trying to induce certain feelings) - I'd say very much the same about Norrington or Bostridge, for example (I once heard Miranda Sawyer make precisely that sort of comment on Late Review when they were listening to a Bostridge disc of English folk songs - I thought she hit the nail on the head much, more so than most classical critics can; predictably, in the next Bostridge interview there were sneering comments to do with what right she and her colleagues had to comment on music at all, and the like). I was chatting recently to an Irish oboist friend who claimed to find Carter especially sterile: despite having rather mixed feelings about Carter myself, I was trying to urge her to listen beyond the Knussen or quasi-Knussen interpretations which I realised had been most of what she had heard.

I've never heard the violin concerto other than in the Böhn/Knussen/Sinfonietta recording, which really put me off it - anyone know the Schule/Palma/OdenseSO recording on Naxos? The oboe concerto is a tough nut that I didn't like for a while - but coming back to the Holliger/Boulez/Intercontemporain recording, I've come to appreciate its bleakness, sadness and lack of concessions.

Very much so, yes - and I like that recording as well. Do you know the first recording (never been on CD as far as I know, though I might be wrong) with Jacob Lateiner/Erich Leinsdorf/Boston Symphony? Wonderful, wonderful playing.

Wish Rosen had recorded that piece, also - really love his recordings of the Sonata (a piece I played for the first time earlier this year) and Night Fantasies (which I might eventually come round to - he makes as convincing a case for it as anyone, but I'm still not wholly convinced).

In some ways, maybe I am wrong in this, it very much reminded me of the Richard Strauss con certo, dunno why. But what the heck!

# 1 of 29 July.      Hi, HtoHe, I'm a bit tardy catching up with this thread but, even I'd been prompt, I would have been a day late as the Prom, you hope to record in September, was transmitted on the previous evening, 28 July on BBC 4.    If a repeat doesn't follow, and you are still interested, do let me know by pm.