Proms Last Night 'a celebration of Britishness'?

Certainly not that, or rather not just that. The ghastly Bill Cash just reveals his ignorance by saying so. First, the Last Night is a celebratory party for everything that's gone before, all 74 Proms in the Albert Hall. Which began with Russians (Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev) and an international British master (Elgar) between them and has seen the visits of three outstanding German orchestras in the past week (below, Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden - the image, ahem, is by Thielemann's approved photographer, Oliver Killig; thanks as ever to the wonderful Chris Christodoulou for the rest). It also includes French and Italian music in the finale, sung by a Peruvian tenor and conducted by a Finn.

Indeed, Sakari Oramo (pictured up top) donned a Union Jack waistcoat for the second half of a previous Last Night, and has championed British music, G&S included. But he's as splendid an example of international versatility as anyone who's appeared at this year's Proms.

Crowdfunding supporters have raised enough money for 500 EU flags to be distributed tomorrow night. Of course the disgusting, immigrant-persecuting Daily Mail and Express howl that it's a Corbynist conspiracy - unlikely given his own disappointing if not entirely unpredictable take on the EU - and the Brexiteers wail foul play. But it's our turn now after years of attack from the lunatic fringe.

I won't be there - as on every occasion for the past 10 or more years, we'll be walking for the Norfolk Churches Trust. I'm privileged enough to be admitted to a final rehearsal of the Verdi Requiem before we catch the train tonight; had to hear something of the great Tamara Wilson. If I have to pick my favourite Proms of the ones I've managed to attend, the internationalism speaks for itself: London-based Russian Pavel Kolesnikov with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland conducted by Israeli Ilan Volkov in Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto (pictured above), a Finnish diva (Karita Mattila) and a Czech conductor (Jiří Bělohlávek) leading a stupendous performance of Janáček's The Makropulos Case

and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by 'our own' Simon Rattle in Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Oh, and if you want more Britishness, there was Mark Wigglesworth conducting Welsh forces (and American Wilson superb alongside UK soloists, having made her first partial and compelling test of the role of Brünnhilde) in Tippett's A Child of Our Time. No doubt which kind of flag Sir Michael would be waving tomorrow night.

BBC Proms: talks and events

Frankly, this is first and foremost a shop-window alert to see if anyone else wants to come along to the remaining two talks I'm giving on Proms-related works: on Janáček's The Makropoulos Case tomorrow (10 August) 2.30-4.30pm at an address in Lancaster Gate, and on Mahler's Seventh Symphony, Thursday 18, same time, in St John's Wood. Addresses supplied on enquiry to me at david.nice@usa.net. Tamara Wilson is also due to return to the Frontline some time in the week of 5 September before her guaranteed-amazing performance in the Verdi Requiem on 9 September. She'll get back to me once she knows her rehearsal schedule. And you'd better believe that Tamara is almost as good a talker as she is a singer (only 'almost' because the singing is something superhuman...). There she is below with Mark Wigglesworth and James Creswell in the closing scene of Act Three from Wagner's Die Walküre.

Back in July we covered Mahler 3 and Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, and I learned a lot more simply retracing familiar territory - there's no end to what you can keep on finding in the great masterpieces. Nor did the performances disappoint - though I felt a little distanced from Haitink's magisterial and at times very slow Mahler and JEG's Roméo would have been perfect if he'd had a Friar Laurence as good and true-bass-y as David Soar for Andrew Davis earlier in the year.

Highlights of the ones I've caught so far? Unquestionably Mark Wigglesworth's converting me almost completely to Tippett's A Child of Our Time, with fabulous soloists alongside Tamara and an apotheosis that really was levitational, and 27-year-old Pavel Kolesnikov as soloist in Tchaikovsky's glorious Second Piano Concerto alongside the superlative National Youth Orchestra of Scotland under Ilan Volkov (who quite transformed the imperial style into something altogether more humanly joyous).

HK Gruber was a star yesterday lunchtime, too.

The NYO experience the previous evening was a little tainted by Ed Gardner's dim view of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra - no idea what he wanted to say, if anything, with the work - and by my neighbour, who sketched throughout. This, inevitably, I didn't mention in the review, but he started by thinking he was some kind of artistic seismograph attached to Iris ter Schiphorst's Gravitational Waves, pencilling squiggles and zig zags as the music took him. You can imagine the resulting chaos on paper. For Strauss and Holst, he contented himself by drawing the players and clearly thinking this would be the main event of the evening for his neighbours, whom he immediately started showing the results.

Halfway through The Planets, I thought that instead of getting into an altercation with him if I asked him to stop, I'd unostentatiously put my rucksack on my knee so I couldn't see his drawing, but this of course impeded his wide-ranging right hand so he got indignant. Then he and his ferocious wife changed seats. I knew she'd be spoiling for a fight at the end, and determined to avoid one, but she got it by sitting and refusing to move as we and a nice, baffled gentleman behind us wanted to get out. 'You are the rudest audience I've ever encountered!' she blustered - having fidgeted throughout and hummed along out of tune to Holst's 'Jupiter' tune aka 'I vow to thee my country' - whereupon I cried shame on her. Oh dear - these conflicts are not to be stoked, but what can one do? Otherwise, the Proms audiences haven't been bad at all, and it was redeemed the next afternoon by my being able to tell the little girls sitting in front the story of The Firebird before it began. Which meant they enjoyed it enormously, if a little actively, playing princesses and ogres, which I didn't mind at all.

Fondest peripheral memory so far: seeing the huge queue stretching around the block ten minutes before Haitink's Mahler 3 was due to start. Even though it may have been mixed up with another waiting for the late-night Bowie Prom (which I switched on the telly back home to watch live, and off when the rapper came on), it reminded me that nothing has changed since I joined the queue for his 'Resurrection' in 1978. As I recount in the Arts Desk review, it was my first Promming season and I arrived too late to be admitted into the Arena; my one and only Gallery experience taught me never to go up there again. Still, it was the summer of Discovering Mahler and Abbado's Chicago recording was the first symphony recordingr I borrowed from Banstead Library.

Thrilled, too, to take dear friend Chris Gunness's 18-year-old nephew Andrew Lavelle to Proms while he was visiting from Houston. His first experience of the Albert Hall - that was good to get - and as he has a very wise head on young shoulders his responses were all perceptive. He soon takes up a place as a very talented viola-player at the Juilliard: what discoveries lie ahead for him. There he is above with uncles and friend.

And this is the Albert Memorial at c.9.30pm. Darkness on emerging from a Prom is a sure sign that the days are getting shorter again - September visits are always tinged with a certain circumstantial melancholy.

The nearby Serpentine Pavilion is a triumph this year, one of the best, from Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. That will last us well into early Autumn.

And I have still to seek out the smaller projects around Kensington Gardens, though I'm told they're not up to scratch.

Proms photos by Chris Christodoulou except lead image of NYO, by Mark Allan. All courtesy of BBC.

Old-new Glasgow

On recent visits to Glasgow, I’ve found myself confined to the more or less unchanging scene up on the hill, around the Theatre Royal, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and the soulless, inadequately acoustic’ed Royal Concert Hall. It would have been so simple to stroll eastwards from Queen’s Street or Central Stations and examine the newly done-up Merchant City of the plain, but I haven’t done that since I was a student and it was still something of a no-man's-land.

My loss, as it turns out from this most recent trip. The nice folk at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra spearheaded by Andrew Trinick - always the best of people to work with, so good to see him again after our BBC Symphony days together - must have thought I was overdoing the compliments about the City Halls. I was in fact genuinely amazed by what’s happened here since those (pre-Royal) Scottish National Orchestra concerts, Järvi blasting us with Shostakovich 4 while before it in the interval little old ladies in their tea-cosy hats sat by the windows of the 1950s-feeling cafeteria.


In effect, the main hall of 1841 has essentially been rebuilt and raised from scratch, with a lovely, airy feeling to its white walls and plastered balcony. Arup associates enhanced the acoustics by opening up the coffered ceiling (photos, by the way, since I forgot my camera, are from the BBCSSO and – further down – via GoMA and The Skinny). The audience, to judge from Thursday’s experience, is of all ages and hugely enthusiastic; there’s a buzz here I’ve never felt at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. The folk at the RSNO, now consigned Glasgow-wise to acoustic hell up on Buchanan Street, can only look on enviously at the Musikverein-style shoebox perfection and point out that the 1100-seater hall, with room for a maximum of 90 musicians on the platform and no resident organ, is too small for what they do.

Which it nearly is for some of the BBCSSO’s noisier scores. But I loved the way the foundations shook with the thundering chorale at the end of Sibelius’s Second Symphony – a generally lithe, no-nonsense interpretation from Ilan Volkov (pictured below in the hall with the orchestra at an earlier concert), which nevertheless gathered quite some intensity through that strange slow movement. And connected, in the wrigglings of the coda there, to the death-throes of Berlioz’s Cleopatra – handsome of voice – true oaky mezzo - if monotonous, colour-wise and a bit pitch-dodgy in the shape of Ruxandra Donose; as usual, the orchestra had the lion’s share of Hector’s shock tactics – the thrummed accompaniments to the three-trombone funeral dirge, the incredible final shudders.


The Berlioz in turn made a muscly complement to the wispier trills and mysteries of Debussy’s Saint Sebastian fragments. And there was a generous bonus, too, in the shape of Julian Anderson’s Eden, starting and ending well with mesmerizing folky-ancient string solos, in between sounding well but not sense-wise adding up to much for me. Though I have to say my godson Alexander, whom it was such a treat to host for an evening now that he’s started a new life as a student at Glasgow University, was excited by it all and told me chapter and verse why.

He also enjoyed some of the sounds I dug out for the 1911 talk. And I loved the lecture-space, a room apparently rediscovered, Danny Pollitt of the RSNO told me the next day, during the renovation work on the building.


Down south at the Barbican’s Fountain Room – much as I prefer it to the hall for the ability to establish a rapport with the audience at pre-performance talks - I nearly hit my head on the low ceiling and remain unlit on the platform; here there’s space enough to accommodate another full house and lighting that is almost phosphorescent. And the streets around Candleriggs take on a light and elegance that felt to me, unless I was hallucinating, a bit Parisian.

With a couple of hours to spare the next morning before catching the train back to London, I was heading for the St Mungo Museum of Religious Art and Life but got unexpectedly waylaid by the delights of GoMA, Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art housed in a splendid neoclassical building in the same grid as the City Halls.


The ground-floor interior had been turned into what the brochure rightly describes as ‘a twenty-first century sculpture court’. My thanks to photographer Nick Milligan and his work in The Skinny for permission to reproduce the next two images.


The artists, all from Glasgow, have been yoked together under the aegis You, Me, Someone Else, and the blurb struggles to link artworks made from found objects with finished products in wood, metal and plaster, but never mind; all have the space they need and some complement the building in surprising ways, like Andrew Miller’s wood and rope chandelier


and his tower of lampshades seen in the wider shot. The most resonant object for me was Lorna Macintyre’s Apollo.


The mythic symbol of sun and music speaks through a disarmingly simple conjunction of a wooden bass, a lyre-like bent metal rod, a harp string and a ball covered in gold leaf. Stravinsky, I fancy, would have approved.

Downstairs at GoMA is a well-used library with coffee-shop attached, while in Gallery 2 Alasdair Gray’s impressions of Glasgow in 1977, when he was commissioned by Elspeth Gray of the People’s Palace to encapsulate the city as he saw it then, showed me a side of the writer-artist I didn’t know from his book illustrations to Lanark and the like.


There’s energy in the big four-part panorama of a single street, and I’d have been delighted to be one of the worthies and/or locals he portrayed. Shame so little of this seems to appear on the web. It can be found in a book that’s just come out which I’d rather like, A Life in Pictures, but it seemed a bit expensive at £35 – the price to pay for good book production, I guess. Anyway, the exhibition was well frequented by allsorts, just as I remember a Kelvingrove display of 19th century architectural designs back in the early 1980s being attended by a whole range of citizens, and the People’s Palace dotted with proud oldsters explaining to their grandchildren the significance of the ordinary objects lodged within. A city with plenty of spirit still, to be sure – as Alexander, one of its most recent citizens fresh from the sleepy comforts of the Borders, is happy to attest.