Unsung heroes at the BBC Proms

‘Unless we continue to create the work for these wonderful instruments, unless we continue to put them in the spotlight, the danger is people won’t pick them up in school,’ explains BBC Proms director David Pickard. He is talking about the focus at this year’s festival on underrepresented solo instruments, from tuba to flute and percussion to theremin – not to mention the musicians who play them.

‘The flipside of that is you also become very aware of people out there who really beat the drum for these instruments, no pun intended,’ he says. ‘But percussionist Colin Currie, oboist Nicholas Daniel, harpist Catrin Finch and viola player Lawrence Power: these are all people who are passionate about their instruments and want them to be seen and want them to be celebrated. It’s nice to reflect their enthusiasm as well.’

A further motivation for Pickard is the growing number of prominent composers wanting to write for solo instruments beyond the ubiquitous piano and violin. With approaching 40 concertos to his name, including for accordion, contrabassoon and tuba, the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho is a particularly striking example. His theremin concerto, Eight Seasons, will be performed by its dedicatee Carolina Eyck on 4 August with the BBC Philharmonic and conductor John Storgårds.

‘After I heard his contrabassoon concerto back in 2010, I fell in love with his music,’ says Eyck, ‘and wrote him an email asking if he would be interested in writing for the theremin. And he was!’ She premiered the ensuing piece the following year with the Lapland Chamber Orchestra and Storgårds, and their eventual recording won a 2015 Echo Klassik prize.

Berlin-based Eyck has been a theremin player sing the age of seven, growing up surrounded by her musician father’s electronic instruments. She also studied the viola at music college, but it was the theremin that stuck. Now, although as yet she has been an infrequent visitor to the UK, she has an extensive international performing career. She is also the author of The Art of Playing the Theremin, which explains a new playing technique she devised.

‘The biggest challenge when playing the theremin is you have to balance between freedom and focus. That’s pretty universal for life as well. On the theremin you have all the freedom – you can play notes anywhere in space. But then to find the precise notes you need to be very still and very focused. That’s what I like about the instrument.’

The title of Aho’s concerto refers to the Sami people’s ancient division of the year into eight seasons in Lapland, and the movements run from ‘Harvest’ to ‘Midnight Sun’. There is a seasonal theme, too, to Sally Beamish’s harp concerto Hive, a BBC Proms co-commission with the World Harp Congress whose premiere was originally planned for 2020.

Soloist Catrin Finch describes the piece, performed on 21 July with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Ariane Matiakh, as a sonic visualisation of the seasonal year in the life of a bee. ‘It’s easy for us to picture that with the sound-world she’s created, especially because the harp is really suited to it as we can make these sounds amazingly – the harp is literally buzzing for quite a lot of it.’

Finch is prominent enough a musician to have a performance centre named after her – the Canolfan Catrin Finch / Catrin Finch Centre in Wrexham – but she agrees that she and her instrument have struggled over the years for recognition.

‘It does have limited repertoire and limited interest, I suppose, and it comes with this idea of not really being a proper instrument. We’re always “miscellaneous”, basically,’ says Finch. ‘I have struggled with that, if I’m honest, in the classical music world and I have found that the more I’ve broadened my musical landscape, my musical world, the more the harp has been accepted.’

That has been most visible in many years of memorable collaboration with kora player Seckou Keita. ‘It’s for each harpist, isn’t it, to find their way? For me that was all the more reason to embrace a lot of other genres, a lot of other styles and types of playing.’

Trombonist Peter Moore is soloist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Vasily Petrenko on 16 August, when they perform the 1957 Trombone Concerto by George Walker, whose centenary is this year. Moore notes that as far as he can ascertain he is only the second trombonist after Christian Lindberg to have featured at the festival. ‘That is a shame but a great honour for me,’ he says. ‘I think you have to approach it by seeing it as a privilege – doing things for the instrument and bringing it to people who wouldn’t have heard it, certainly in that capacity and that setting.’

He echoes Finch’s point about the lack of prominent repertoire in an industry that relies on repertoire recognition – although both point out there is more music than you might think. ‘You need trailblazers to come out and work with composers and show the music world what the instrument is capable of,’ he adds. ‘But that’s up to us as much as composers. If you as a performer put the integrity of what you do first, work really hard, practise, think about the sounds you’re making, think about what you’re communicating to people and make it the best you can, then people will come back, or go away and talk about the instrument or that piece of music. It’s up to us – as performers we have to do better.’

For tickets see www.bbc.co.uk/proms; all the BBC Proms are broadcast on BBC Radio 3.