UFO Info Week-End

Leeds is a belt-and-braces kind of city not given to making rash decisions on carpets

Leeds is a belt-and-braces kind of city, not given to making rash decisions on carpets or anything else. For 30 years, Leeds North-East was the Tory seat of Margaret Thatcher’s mentor, Sir Keith Joseph.
Over the past ten years, however, there has been a clear, if cautious, swing to the Left. God knows how many committee hours went into democratically selecting the exact shade of the carpet in Leeds Civic Hall. The wine-dark Wilton that softens the footfalls of the mighty in the Grand Banqueting Hall is a politic blend of Red Flag crimson and Tory Blue A carpet for all seasons.

The City Council should market the colour as “Marginal Magenta”. Proms places: pounds 3 (arena), pounds 2 (gallery) at the door All concerts are also broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Which composers today, if any, foreshadow the new era to come? This year’s Proms season offers as good an opportunity as any to investigate.The Centenary Proms Season opens on Friday at the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, London SW7 Advance booking: 0171-589 8212. The world since the end of the Cold War is a place of frightening uncertainty, but it could also come to be seen as a time of valuable and productive flux.

In a recent interview, Tavener quoted a Sufi mystic: “All the doors to Heaven and Hell stand open at the moment, and we can go through whichever we choose.” One might add that we are also free to decide which door leads where. On the other hand, few would dare to speculate about where new music is headed – in fact, the idea that there is a single entity called “new music” or that it must be “headed” anywhere, seems less tenable than ever.The composer John Tavener, for one, appears to be saying that we in the West are growing out of the belief that progress is everything. What does it say about the musical state we are in? Well, despite what some neo-phobics may say, we do seem to have arrived at a point where – thankfully – style is no longer the moral issue it was back in the modernist Sixties and Seventies.Few critics or composers are likely to tick a new piece off for its harmonic, rhythmic or colouristic language per se – not in public, anyway. There is no prevailing standard against which such stylistic features can be evaluated.

It’s in the second half, too, so unless BBC1 is very clever (or very insistent), it will have to broadcast it along with the rest of its regular live coverage. Malcolm Arnold’s reworking of the Henry Wood Fantasia on British Sea Songs a few years back was controversial enough; what will the Last-Nighters make of Birtwistle’s Panic?Despite the odd, possibly significant, omission here or there, for anyone who isn’t terminally incurious, the Proms Centenary offers an intriguing overview. It is programmed, provocatively, on the penultimate night, before Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.And then there is John Drummond’s even more wicked parting shot, a new work by that arch-fiend of British modernists, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, placed smack in the midst of the chauvinistic junketings of the Last Night (16 Sept). After a few ominous back- stage rumblings, it seems that Luciano Berio’s advertised new work has materialised (15 Sept): it is called Shofar, for chorus and orchestra, and it sets poems by the risingly modish poet Paul Celan. Where better to test it than at the Proms?The anti-modernists will have plenty to grumble about, though – which, one suspects, is what some of them really enjoy.