BBC Proms 54 and 55 review: Two concerts fill the Royal Albert Hall with sacred music

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Prom 54: Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concert

★★☆☆☆

The Royal Albert Hall is London’s great secular monument to science and the arts, but two concerts this week fill it with sacred music. And, more unexpectedly, some tap dancing.

Jazz-great Duke Ellington considered the three Sacred Concerts to be his “most important” works. These sequences of sacred songs, psalms, anthems and ensembles bring Broadway and big band into the church – even, famously, featuring a tap-dancing routine first performed in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral.

The musical shock of Ellington’s glossy, glittering showbiz brilliance lives in the friction with a sacred space. In the Royal Albert Hall, animated by lighting with West End aspirations and plenty of illicit camera flashes, all sense of ritual, of transgressive piety, is lost.

It doesn’t help that this musical collage, combining numbers from all three Concerts, is over-stuffed – an entertainment carrying the weight of an extended sermon on its swaying shoulders. There are outstanding moments from jazz-legend Monty Alexander (whose stylish piano improvisation briefly shrinks the hall down to a club), from the Nu Civilisation Orchestra (cream of the UK’s young jazz musicians) and from Carleen Anderson and her army of vocal generals the UK Vocal Assembly, but neither the stiff formality of the BBC format nor Ellington’s kitsch, oddly facile anthems gives them much help.

Prom 55: Jephtha

★★★★☆

There’s better when the Proms return to their home territory and Handel’s final oratorio Jephtha. Just as Verdi’s Requiem was mocked as the composer’s “latest opera in ecclesiastical dress”, so many of Handel’s oratorios put a pious face on nakedly populist, theatrical entertainment. But not Jephtha. Handel’s last oratorio has a sincerity, a tenderness to it that is quite different.

So far the Proms have stuck with period ensembles for their ongoing Handel cycle. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra here break that tradition, and while we miss the percussive attack of gut strings, the group (directed from the harpsichord by baroque specialist Richard Egarr) relish the lyricism and lightness their modern instruments can bring to this score, even if occasionally Egarr’s athletic tempi risk sending them off the rails.

Tenor Allan Clayton in the title role and bass-baritone Cody Quattlebaum’s Zebul are the pick of the cast vocally, matching the building for operatic scope. Sincerity and simplicity are a hard sell in London’s grandest, noisiest hall, but somehow Egarr and his forces find them, transforming Biblical melodrama into something humane and deeply moving.