Music: Promenade Concerts
[Under development: 21 May 2005 ]
In the summer of 1977 I attended the Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, London, UK. This was for me the achievement of a minor life dream, for I had watched the event on television every year since my parents first acquired a television. It had only been the previous year (1976) when I attended a Henry Wood Promenade Concert for the first time: I listened transfixed to Janacek's Glagolitic Mass while standing "up in the gods" (the Gallery), the great Albert Hall organ booming out overwhelming chords. Compared with the audiences at Promenade concerts, I have never since encountered an audience so focused and intent on listening to, and making sense of, demanding and wonderful music. The following year I attended several Prom concerts, including "Beethoven Night", with James Loughran conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra (I assume) playing Beethoven's Ninth (Choral) Symphony. I slept out on the pavement that night, hoping to buy next day a returned ticket for the Last Night. The pavement was hard and cold, and the mid-September night was long, noisy with London traffic, and loud with whispers of autumn. Saturday dawned and time continued to drag. I so wanted to be able to stand in the Arena and be surrounded by excitement and music. The queue in front of me slowly shortened as tickets sporadically exchanged hands. Richard Baker (the long-time BBC television presenter of the Proms) came and interviewed some of the people in the queue. Lunchtime came and went, but I was too anxious to eat more than a few peanuts. Then I was at the front of the queue. Would I be forced to decide between a ticket for the Gallery and not getting in at all. "Arena to Gallery: Fancy a game of ping-pong? Ping." "Pong." And the ticket came. I handed over money. Clutching my passport to the evening, I skipped round the Albert Hall to the queue for the Arena, joy mingling with tears of relief. A few hours later I was caught up by the rich, deep swell of music and song, tossed, as though from one wave crest to another, between strings and brass, percussion and woodwind, and finally dumped outside on the pavement, the concert over.
In the summer of 1978 I bought a season ticket for the Promenade concerts. Five or six days each week, I stood towards the front of the Arena, or sat cross-legged on the floor towards the back, attending my first formal lessons in my classical music education. Until I started attending Prom concerts, I liked many of Beethoven's symphonies (particularly the Eroica (3) and Choral (9)), and enjoyed some Tchaikovsky, but that was about it. I found Brahms, Mendelson, Mozart and Wagner all boring. As well as helping me to approach what I did not understand, the Proms also introduced me to the work of composers such as Sibelius, Mahler ("Wouldn't you just DIE without Mahler?" quote from Educating Rita), Janacek, Bartok, Messiaen and Ligetti. I recall Andrew Davies conducting several concerts that year, but can't remember seeing Simon Rattle.
I did not enjoy the Last Night that year. The Proms season had been a
demanding and emotional journey. Beyond the Albert Hall, my life was in poor
shape, with few prospects of improvement, and I was in little mood for
frivolity. I found the gross, crass, English nationalism offensively
triumphalist in tone and xenophobically exclusive. The presence in the audience
of so many people (of whom I had been one the previous year) who had not
participated in the antecedent legs of this musical journey felt unwelcome and
disrespectful. Their behaviour, bobbing up and down, whistling, stamping on the
floor, punctuating the Sailor's Hornpipe with blasts from a foghorn, humming,
and being generally rowdy, no longer felt like joyful enthusiasm, but course
and loutish, waving their Union Flags and St
It is a matter of considerable regret that I have since attended only a handful of Promenade concerts over the past twenty years. Had the events of summer 1978 not been so unremittingly bad, then maybe things would have worked out differently.
