Errollyn Wallen, CBE, composer GETTY Images
On Friday July 18, the BBC Symphony Orchestra opened the 131st season of the Proms festival. Amid the household names of classical repertoire—Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture, Sibelius’s violin concerto, Vaughan Williams’s Sancta civitas—was a new addition: the world premiere of Errollyn Wallen’s The Elements, for large orchestra. It is one of five world premieres of her work that will happen in 2025, but Wallen says of the offer that “The diary was very full, but I don’t care. [When the BBC called] I just had to say yes.” (BBC Proms interview, below, [01:01:03])
The Elements appeared in a concert of five pieces kicking off the Proms festival, which runs for eight weeks every summer and has done so since the 1890s. The original organizers Robert Newman and Sir Henry Wood—Arthur Bliss’s Birthday Fanfare that opened the concert is a tribute to Wood—began producing popular “Promenade” concerts to fill a gap (i.e., August) in the performance schedules of London’s orchestral musicians. Orchestras were typically in “recess” during the hottest summer months, which meant no concerts, and therefore no ticket sales, and therefore reduced income for musicians and concert organizers. The BBC began its relationship with the Proms in 1927—the 32nd season—and has continued ever since. The BBC Orchestra formed in 1930 and quickly became the “hosting orchestra” of the festival.
The Elements is Wallen’s first composition to appear on an opening program of the Proms, though she has had plenty of other pieces featured in previous seasons. In 1998 the performance of her Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra made her the first black woman to have a Proms performance; in 2019 she premiered The Frame is Part of the Painting with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Elim Chan; in 2020 she presented a reimagined version of Hubert Parry’s classic “Jerusalem” for the twenty-first century. The 2025 premiere could not have been more different from the 2020 performance of “Jerusalem,” which was performed by a socially-distanced BBC Orchestra with reduced instrumentation. For The Elements the full complement of orchestral instruments was available, and Wallen wasted no time in putting them all to work.
Initial critical opinions on the piece have been . . . hazy. I noticed in the first few days following the Proms premiere that Wallen’s piece is the one that gets passed over in reviews of the concert as a whole (followed closely by Bliss’s Birthday Fanfare for Sir Henry Wood). In the critics’ defense there is quite a lot of music to cover, but all of the critical chips go on a combination of the Vaughan Williams and Lisa Batiashvili’s performance of the Sibelius violin concerto. When the critics—as far as I have found—do include Wallen in their assessments, they tend to focus on the composer instead of on the music (She never disappoints! She lives in a lighthouse!) or they offer assessments of the piece without detailing any specifics. One critic opines that the work feels “not entirely successful” without ever describing what it actually sounds like. This is begging for a follow-up: not successful at what? At being written by Purcell or Ravel? I should hope not, since Wallen is a living woman and both Purcell and Ravel are dead men. At not having the same impact as the Sancta civitas, in roughly one-third of the time and with no biblical text? Not a fair comparison, even if the pieces were programmed one after the other. To make a case for being “unsuccessful” a critic must establish the terms of success against which a piece is measured. At the risk of sounding acerbic, is it possible that the piece wasn’t “successful” or “impactful” because there was no existing critical literature designating it so?
No one knows the piece at its world premiere as they do a classical warhorse; it’s impossible to enter the hall with a pre-formed opinion of the piece in question on its own merits and not based on the composer’s previous work or reputation unless you have been attending its rehearsals. Having heard it live at its premiere, I think that The Elements successfully captures the joy of music and the joy present in Wallen’s creative process in sound. The piece is a tone poem with clear sections—enough structure to draw an audience in, but not so much that it pulls focus from Wallen’s central themes, which are “the fundamentals of music, love, life, and what I love about being a composer. A celebration of playing with the possibilities available to the composer.” (BBC Proms interview, below, [1:01:25])
The recording of Proms Concert #1 on which The Elements premieres can be heard here via BBC Sounds for 78 days from the performance, or until October 4th. Timestamps in my analysis refer to this recording.
[1:21:40] The opening downward glissando takes me directly to the theme from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that’s the last of outer space to hear. Wallen’s influences from jazz and latin musics are immediately in the spotlight with rhythmically offset low winds and strings. Beginning with bass/lower voices always makes for a dramatic opening, and together with a deft shaker groove from the percussion section they strike an immediate “cool” factor. You might hear a little Bernstein (West Side Story, in particular) if you know it’s there, in the orchestration as well as in the rhythms, but this is not a direct reference. There’s a lushness to Wallen’s wind writing that I love because it tells me that she has plans for the whole orchestra. More famous composers than she have treated it as a kind of “strings and things” ensemble—writing primarily for the strings, and then adding token wind and percussion parts to try to spice things up a bit. If anything, The Elements does the reverse; plenty of its melodic passages would seem right at home in a wind band.
This first section with its offset rhythms and shaker groove is all about contour, creating shapes out of dance rhythms that move together. A trumpet fanfare [1:24:25] signals the transition to something new—to fans of British music, something quite familiar. For me, this is the moment in the piece where Wallen flashes her CBE: this is where you hear that she’s a composer in the British tradition. Overlapping waves of woodwinds, long horn tones, and harp flourishes evoke the Atlantic panorama outside the Scottish lighthouse where she composes. Wind instruments—especially flutes—have evoked birds, air, and their movement by trilling for as long as composers have written music for them, and they do so here. Both the setting and the music sound like something from another era, recalling landscapes in music of not only Delius, Ravel, and early Vaughan Williams, but also of Ethel Smyth, Grace Williams, and Imogen Holst. Wallen is drawing on a distinguished tradition in British music, but it doesn’t seem like a looming presence to live up to or a shadow that she feels she must step away from. There’s tradition in here, but it’s not cramping her style. She’s also not grandiose with her brass writing, which I appreciate. There are sections that are powerful where these instruments that wait patiently at the back of the orchestra get to take up a lot of space, but Wallen understands that there’s so much more to them than that.
Not to be outdone by their wind colleagues, the strings [1:27:40] take a moment in the spotlight to try out some lines with the same kind of whirling movement. Perhaps it’s the presence of lower tones in the string orchestration from the cellos and basses, but I hear them more as water than air, and it brings the ocean part of the Atlantic landscape into the hall. The winds get the last word, however, and a light dusting of the glockenspiel gives the effect of sunlight reflecting sharply off the water’s surface.
A whoosh, and then we’re into the final section with a fanfare. [1:28:35] Here, Wallen is “Master of the King’s Music.” The fanfare is a nod to ceremonial British tradition—it’s something these brass players are very good at, after all— but goes forward in modern shape and style. No one would ever mistake this for ancient music, and they’re not meant to. Some of the groove from the first section returns, but it’s not the same dance as before. Amid the rhythmic acceleration to what sounds like the finale is more than a little chaos—angular strings, piano cluster chords, traffic whistles at full blast. A moment of (planned) audience snapping; a single cheer at what very well could have been the end but isn’t, and Wallen dives back in for the final section. A short lyric passage, mid-range and closer to earth than the one that began the second section, twirls right back into the dance rhythms before the final festive finish. [1:33:53] As a piece that is meant to celebrate all that Wallen believes is best about life, love, and music, it is wildly successful.
The audience greeted the final note with more-than-polite applause, from all rows of the house and floor. How different this was—and must have felt for the composer—from 2020, with a large opening audience and many Prommers in the pit. Wallen has admitted that she can get quite nervous before a premiere, preparing to experience a new piece of music coming from the page to the stage for the first time. She told the BBC that she had “three nights of no sleep, thinking,” and that “as you’re listening [to rehearsals] you’re composing alternate versions [of the piece] in your head, internally revising.” But it’s the composer’s privilege to watch a piece grow through rehearsals—as it must do, especially with a work for large forces—and hear it move from inside their head out into the world. Wallen has famously said of music that “Traditions change—and they should change.” Under her pen they do, but with all of the reverence and respect that they deserve.
The recording of Proms Concert #1 on which The Elements premieres can be heard here via BBC Sounds for 78 days from the performance, or until October 4th.