Royal Albert Hall, London
This was not like any orthodox Prom you might have seen, nor was it like any orthodox gig. A tie-in with the BBC's Bafta-winning nature series Human Planet, it was an ambitious hybrid. Accompanying stunning footage from the series we had snippets of a Hollywood-style soundtrack (from Nitin Sawhney's score), a tantalising trailer for a forthcoming BBC4 documentary (Scrapheap Orchestra), and a kind of mini-Womad (in the form of five world music guests).
Sawhney's score didn't always work. Aside from a beautiful miniature entitled Man and Nature, most of it sounded a little pedestrian in isolation from the images. Fortunately, the rest of the show more than made up for this.
The guests were all artists featured in the series, playing music that seemed particularly attuned to an extreme landscape. There was the remarkable Rasmus Lyberth from Greenland, whose huge, melismatic voice was backed by violin and accordion drones. There was Zambia's Enock Mbongwe on the one-string kalumbu, pressing it to his bare belly while singing in a hilarious variety of registers. There was Ayarkhaan, three women from Siberia whose a cappella performance replicated the sounds of horses neighing, clattering hooves and howling wolves. There was the close-harmony singing of Papua New Guinea's Bibilang Shark-Calling Group, seven men who sound uncannily like Simon & Garfunkel. And there was the wonderfully chaotic six-piece Khusugtun, Mongolia's answer to the Violent Femmes.
Best of all was the Scrapheap Orchestra, where the BBC Concert Orchestra switched to instruments created from items such as washing-up bowls (cello), a ventilation duct (tuba), a coathanger (violin bow). For all the comic potential, their version of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture had the right bombast and vulgarity. It was the high point of an excellent, if unorthodox, Prom.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/24/human-planet-prom-review
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