Oklahoma! BBC Proms John Wilson Orchestra

The distinction between popular and classical music is becoming more and more blurred and much is due for this to The John Wilson Orchestra who regularly appear at the Proms and at a production at Glyndebourne of Madame Butterfly I saw last October. The orchestra faithfully plays the music of the Great American Musicals and yesterday for a semi-staged version of Oklahoma!.

As a great admirer of John Wilson and lover of the great musical it rather pains me to say the semi-staged version does not work. It’s neither the fish of the full blown theatrical spectacular nor the fowl of listening to a varied songbook of musical hits which is normally this orchestra’s constituency. There is singing, dancing and Miles Brigstocke humorously appears as the peddler but there is a bare stage with few props to create the outdoor folksy context of the musical.

There are some great songs like June is busting out all over and Surrey with a Fringe on Top. It was the first musical in which Lorenz Hart did not collaborate with Richard Rogers but rather Oscar Hammerstein. The duo went to score South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. Now regarded as ‘schmaltz’ they were quite revolutionary in breaking the mould of leggy dance routines and facile plots with darker themes such as interracial relationships in South Pacific and Nazism in The Sound of Music

I am not the biggest admirer of the Royal Albert Hall. The ceiling is too high so, acoustically, sound gets lost and it’s difficult given the roundness of the amphitheatre to see the orchestra front on. Nonetheless it was full, quite something for an afternoon concert broadcast on the BBC, and where my stalls ticket with an oblique view was £63.