“The live experience of Bliss’s The Beatitudes is nothing but full of awe”
On the first day of the TFL strike, Sunday 7 September 2025, this night’s BBC Proms opened with Ruth Gipps’s Death on the Pale Horse, followed by Grieg’s Piano Concerto (soloist: Lukas Sternath) and, after the interval, Sir Arthur Bliss’s The Beatitudes (soprano: Elizabeth Watts; tenor: Laurence Kilsby). Written in 1943, Gipps’s tone poem responds directly to a William Blake illustration of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The brass section takes centre stage, with the rest of the orchestra providing a responsive, and dialogical texture. In general, this rendition of *Death on the Pale Horse* feels rather pastoral and lyrical.
Austrian pianist Lukas Sternath made his Proms debut by giving us Grieg’s Piano Concerto. What makes Grieg’s Piano Concerto so fascinating is that it feels like a connecting point within the Romantic era. It may not be the most ground-breaking, nor the summit of pianistic achievement, but rather something as becoming, one foot in the past, possibly Schumann, and another toward the future, Tchaikovsky, and Grieg his own. If I were an audience member of the 1860s, I would have been excited by such uncertainty.
Such qualities of transition also leave ample room for wide interpretations both temporally and geographically. However, I remain uncertain where Sternath’s interpretation situates itself. His opening felt overtly dramatic, while the cadenza leaned towards the showy and self-conscious, perhaps conductor Sakari Oramo also prefers such theatrical rendition. There was also a trait of slowness which I also recognised in his Salzburg performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in 2024. Such combination, slow but dramatic, lightweight but self-aware, presented itself as both intriguing and perplexing.
My first live experience of Bliss’s The Beatitudes is nothing but full of awe. Exceeding much of my expectation, Bliss’s music struck me as at the same time elegant yet powerful, dramatic and deeply emotional. Such conflict quality is consistently interwoven into the very fabric of this cantata. Elizabeth Watts illuminated the night as the soprano with her mellow and translucent tone delivered with a remarkable sense of ease and natural release. This quality perfectly matched the serene elegance of harp, shaping stark contrast with the voices of the mob.
The BBC Symphony Chorus’s performance was equally striking, as they successfully mastered not only the brutality of the mob, but also the hushed harmony with restraint and transparent texture- two poles in Bliss’s writing that together architects a majestic piece with sweeping, stormy contrasts. Commissioned for the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962 together with Britten’s War Requiem, The Beatitudes offers the other side of coin that yearns for peace and prosperity. Strangely, I didn’t feel The Beatitudes that “modern”, especially compared to Britten who often uses music to reflect human psychology. Instead, The Beatitudes reminded me more of the late Romantic tradition that resonates with Vaughan Williams, teacher of Gipps. Oramo’s conducting of the BBC Symphony Orchestra felt exceptionally powerful and passionate, imbued with a trait of theatricality that heightened the drama of Bliss’s score.