Classical Music

The Proms this week

Just when the world’s great capitals shut up classical music shop for the summer, London’s preparing for the biggest music festival in the world: the BBC Proms, an institution as British as Wimbledon strawberries and cream, cattle-truck discomfort stoically borne or cheerfully queueing a disporportionate length of time for a possible bargain. Except it’s cheaper than Wimbledon strawberries and has more flavour; the venerable Albert Hall now has air-conditioning; and the bargain’s real: you can stand or squat with the seatless promenaders while some of the world’s greatest musicians do their stuff for a fiver or less. Feature continues

It’s all so British that it’s a surprise to find that promenade concerts – where the audience walked around – originated in the late nineteenth century with ‘Jullien, the eminent musico’ (as immortalised in a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song listing the famous), a Frenchman whose forenames are given by some authorities as Louis Georges Maurice Adolphe Roch Abel Albert Antonio Alexandre Noé Jean Lucien Daniel Eugène Joseph-Lebrun Joseph-Barême Thomas Thomas Thomas-Thomas Pierre Cerbon Pierre-Maurel Barthélemi Arthus Alphonse Bertrand Emanuel Dieudonné Josué Vincent Luc Michel Jules-de-la-Plane Jules-Bazin Julio-César. He died insane, and recent musicologists have timidly questioned the accuracy of these monikers. A cautious lot, musicologists.

The audience, especially the prommers, are part of the mystique. The standees in the Arena chant carefully rehearsed messages to their mates in the Gallery (a tip: it’s less crowded up there and the acoustics are allegedly better) and all the prommers can provide a surprise greeting for the players. After the Philadelphia Orchestra under Muti had been ripped apart by a national critic, the crestfallen players arrived for their second concert to be greeted with the comforting mass chant of ‘Who is Paul Griffiths anyway?’ And the audience’s ferociously dedicated absorption in the music once prompted a collective post-concert letter to the Times correspondence columns from the blasé Vienna Philharmonic beginning ‘We love you’. It makes up for the hoary old jokes like shouting ‘heave!’ when the piano lid is raised (and ‘ho!’ when… you get the idea).

Yes, audience high-jinks are where it gets delicate. The Last Night of the Proms has become notorious for audience byplay with hooters and car-horns, flags and funny hats – and that’s even before the boisterous or moist-eyed ballyhoo with hope and glory, ‘Britannia’ and ‘Jerusalem’. Every year there comes a puritanical demand that the Last Night be toned down, but it’s often not clear whether it’s the imagined jingoism or the Hooray Henry heartiness that’s being targetted. There are two separate elements in the Last Night, one deeply irritating, the other innocuous, and neither as sinister as knee-jerk reactions from the po-faced and humourless would suggest.

Special circumstances can change everything. Mark Elder (neither po-faced nor humourless) had a point when he wanted to tone down the patriotic hoo-ha in deference to the Gulf War. It was an understandable reaction though it got him dismissed by John Drummond, the then Proms supremo. Drummond, I suspect, sees the flag-waving for what it is: almost self-parody. Serious nationalists don’t accompany their banners with silly hats and false noses. A Times critic (since moved on) once expressed himself appalled by the Last Night frolics and embarrassed for his outraged Russian companion. Doubtless the Russian was expecting a march-past and the latest military hardware (and how odd that the Germans and Dutch, to name only two, adore the Last Night and have started putting on their own). What would the paranoid puritans make of the national day celebrated by nearly every other country in the world, complete with pomp and glorifying self-awareness? Anyone disrupting the parade by honking a car horn in Groucho Marx specs and moustache would soon learn the difference between nationalism and overgrown schoolboy japes.

Leave the flag-wavers and the tearful singalongs alone. This sentimental Saturday-night party in what’s been called the nation’s village hall is far less sinister than thought-up attempts at enforcing a national identity by one of the most arrogantly anti-democratic governments in recent times. On the other hand, clamp down on the jokers who wreck what little serious music there is on the Last Night. Their playfulness, exacerbated by TV cameras, is cringingly toe-curling. The magisterial Drummond gritted his teeth and brought roughage to the Last Night with such non-Hooray Henry works as Harrison Birtwistle’s aptly-named ‘Panic’, which prompted reactions from figures as improbable as Anne Robinson. We need more of that.