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Reader rating
Description: A programme including Vaughan Williams's The Wasps Overture, Jonathan Harvey's Come Holy Ghost, Judith Weir's Ascending Into Heaven and Saint-Saens's Symphony No 3: Organ. Conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, Stephen Cleobury and Andrew Nethsingha.
Phone: 0207589 8212
Website: www.royalalberthall.com
Trains: Tube: High Street Kensington 
, Tube / Bus: 9, 10, 52, 360 
Extra info: Pub, Food
Forget centenaries, bicentenaries, tercentenaries. Let’s celebrate Cambridge University’s founding 800 years ago. The Proms love anniversaries and assembled college choirs from King’s and St John’s, Clare, Gonville & Caius and Trinity, and more besides. The conductors had Cambridge connections, as did baritone Simon Keenlyside and organist Thomas Trotter; so, too, the composers. Only the BBC Symphony Orchestra was an outsider.
Prince Charles attended but did not join in the National Anthem, and certainly not the line “Long to reign over us”. Then it was on to the proper stuff. Vaughan Williams’s The Wasps Overture sounded oddly like music from a Western, while his Five Mystical Songs received an eloquent reading from Keenlyside, managing to sound conversational while delivering the full weight of expression.
I assumed that Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Genesis of Secrecy referred to Cambridge’s spy-factory reputation, but no. Wigglesworth manipulated “shards” of other’s music, making them his, not theirs. The result was a sequence of shifting moods, skilfully delineated. Andrew Davis conducted.
Andrew Nethsingha took the podium for Jonathan Harvey’s Come, Holy Ghost, which had unaccompanied choir floating across centuries of harmonic adventures, ending up in sweetly destabilised modernity. In Judith Weir’s Ascending into Heaven organ and choir created a jazzy perspective on the celestial city; Stephen Cleobury conducted.
Davis returned for Saint-Saëns, who had an honorary Cambridge degree, although the real reason for performing his Organ Symphony was that it brings the house down: almost literally with the organ at full volume.
On BBC Radio 3, 2pm Friday.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Great fun but during Saint-Saens the orchestra fell apart, perhaps reflecting the fact he had nothing to do with the university or 800 years or even light blue.Enjoy the shambles on BBC3. The rest was fun and in time...but in 200 years will it be music or great comedy sketches that makes the historic cut??
- Duncan, london
