Poulenc and Adams: "Wild Night" at Proms 2026

The Proms has staged more uncompromisingly modernist works over the past decade, but the spotlight cast this year on Anglo-American and Francophone mavericks—ranging from the key American minimalists and their contemporary Thomas Adès to the Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz and the genre-defying Josephine Stephenson, alongside precursors including Varèse, Lili Boulanger, Poulenc, Copland, and Feldman—celebrates a continuing spirit of musical novelty that projects a more joyous brand of modernism. It is one situated firmly in the here and now, responding positively to the exhilarating energy of urban rhythms and unflinchingly traversing cultural and geographical divides.

Sinfonietta (1947) and the Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos (1932) were perfect choices for showcasing the frivolous side of the ‘half-rascal, half-monk’ Poulenc. The delightfully playful contrasts between modal passages and late-Romantic harmony in these works, together with the unapologetically direct traces of Haydn, Mozart, Liszt, Ravel, and Stravinsky, reveal a compositional voice that is at once distinctive and eclectic. Complementing such carefreeness was John Adams’s spectacular Harmonium. Since his predecessors have already turned (Riley and Young) or are about to turn 90 (Reich and Glass), Adams’s return in the programme is urgent (he is turning 80 in 2027) and marks something historically meaningful for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra—it was precisely they who introduced the work into Britain under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle four decades ago.

Perhaps it is a combination of Poulenc’s piquant classicism and a characteristically Japanese restraint that has shaped the economy and elegance of Kazuki Yamada’s conducting style. Evidently, taking the stage with his very own CBSO allowed Yamada to display the laid-back assurance that comes with familiarity: if a minimalist approach could communicate an intention with perfect clarity—like a light tap or even split-second freezes, gesture-wise—Yamada never embellished it with anything superfluous. The anachronistically retro and rather unorthodox Sinfonietta—Poulenc’s only symphonic work—offers a good opportunity to observe this. The work is more interested in experiments with musical mood and continually shifting orchestration than in conventional formal coherence, and its blatant denial of structural depth—or anything that might be called ‘symphonic development’—creates real challenges for keeping the momentum growing as organically as possible within Poulenc’s already episodic form. Yamada’s visually imaginative yet never over-emphatic gestures effortlessly drew scintillating colours from the woodwinds, brass, and harp—a sonority that fascinated Poulenc. The interplay between violins and cellos near the end of the second movement, together with small surging tides, was animated with an arresting vitality. In the following Andante, layered with tunes, carving out the melodic silhouette and agential elements within the parts at the phrase level appeared to be the conductor’s focus.

Kazuki Yamada and CBSO at Royal Albert Hall © BBC/Chris Christodoulou

For the concert, Yamada and Lucas and Arthur Jussen were both playing from their staples—while French music is at the heart of the former’s repertoire, the Jussen brothers have certainly remade the Concerto into a tasteful party piece for pianists since their first take on the work in 2009. The technical execution was impeccable, but the real surprise was how much the brothers’ ensemble and concerto skills had further matured when compared with their performances of the work eight, or even three, years ago. Beyond their mutual attentiveness, they now possess a greater ease in engaging more fully with the orchestra’s dynamics, which was particularly evident in the first quiet section in the Allegro, where the pianos answer to individual instruments in the orchestra. The rather Ravel-esque passage of a bare piano duo towards the end of the movement was another highlight. To achieve such profound synergy through music of so contemplative and fantastical a nature far transcends anything that could be accomplished by mere eye contact alone. Poulenc’s music is full of witty pauses, something between Haydn’s deliberateness and Feldman’s auratic contemplation. At the conclusion of the movement, Yamada and the brothers created a magical moment where the music seemed both to continue and to remain suspended in stillness.

Musically, the brothers were consistently one throughout; the dovetailing phrases and the alignment between parts were nothing short of immaculate. More intriguing, however, were their slightly diverging stage personae at the keyboard. Authur, at the second piano, leaned more readily into the festive mood, his highly expressive upper-body movements conveying the uninhibited pleasure of a pop musician relishing those groovy segments in the score. Indeed, an infectious, convivial spirit anchored Yamada and the brothers’ reimagining of the work. The conductor personally favours not a hierarchical relationship with his musicians, but one founded on communication and reciprocity in the pursuit of a shared musical vision. By the end of the concerto, this ideal had found its fullest expression: what was most moving here was neither the virtuosity nor even the music itself, but the sense of togetherness among those making it. If the performance left anything to be desired, it was that—at least for listeners already familiar with Lucas and Arthur Jussen through the wealth of video recordings available online—relatively little exceeded expectations. The same was true of their encore, Strausseinander, a Die Fledermaus medley arranged by Igor Roma. One might simply have wished that they had pushed the already feverish atmosphere even further—perhaps by taking a more adventurous approach and allowing its jazzy inflections to open out into something more freely improvised.

Lucas and Arthur Jussen © BBC/Chris Christodoulou

The most frequently performed work by Adams at the Proms, Harmonium (1981) transformed the mood of the concert with its pure, pulsing bliss, enveloping everyone in the hall in its immense choral force. It is a work about indefinable love, erotic ecstasy, and death as familiar as an old friend, distantly echoing two other spiritual works performed just three days earlier: Messiaen’s tonal L’Ascension (1932–33) and Lili Boulanger’s Vieille prière bouddhique (1914–17). With two choirs joining a large orchestra, this is undoubtedly a challenging work to conduct. Yamada, however, opted for tempi that were quicker than ususal, which in no way impeded the realisation of one of the work’s most vital qualities: the melting of voices and orchestra into a single shimmering mass. Indeed, Yamada—himself also a choral conductor—once remarked in an interview that, for him, the ideal orchestral sound is one that comes close to the human voice.

The Royal Albert Hall is possibly the best place in London to stage the work, given its architectural layout—the tiered spatial arrangement of the orchestral sections, with the female and male choirs positioned on either side, was as visually compelling as it was aurally (think of the tiered form in depictions of heaven in Renaissance paintings). This vertical layout brought out the best in the percussion, which was situated at the center of the space: from the extraordinarily virtuosic marimba and the highly rhetorical cowbells to the ritualistic tubular bells and gong, each instrument had its moment to shine. The spatial mapping effectively magnified the magic in the composer’s remarkable ability to blend and mobilise sound: the marimba’s binding effect in the first movement, the way the male voices and low strings seemed to merge into a single unison, and the richly varied relationships in the interplay between the female and male choral parts in the second movement were all presented before the audience with almost three-dimensional clarity. Yamada sustained his carefully measured expressiveness throughout, his prowess in harnessing choirs coming to the fore in those moments when he simultaneously cued the female and male choruses with his left and right hands. Scarcely anyone could have failed to be stunned by the gliding trombone calls in the final movement, where the almost transcendental power of the radiant metallic cacophony captured both the rapture of the woman in Dickinson’s ‘wild night’ and our own, there in the hall.