Prom 76: Last Night of the Proms 2015 (12.09.15)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

At least 'aging clubbers' on a nostalgia fest is a good riposte to 'self-elected snobs'.

Not that one cannot be both!

[Flosshilde]

Yes he does, doesn't he? I'm just trying to imagine just what would happen if he scrapped all the popular/ light elements, in the whole season or even just in the Last Night.

Obviously there'll be lots of happy boarders here, and no doubt a good few more of the same view throughout this country and the whole world But what about the reactions of the media, and of the many politicians who don't much like funding elitist art or any sort of art? Anyone care to imagine the headlines and the feeding frenzy?

A fairly small group, I think

"as for the Radio 1 club-fest, our critic remarked that it was 'crowd-pleasing but not ground-breaking'"

The same could be said of a fair few of the classical music Proms - many (most?) of them present the same old repertoire, without bringing any new insights, & most of the visiting orchestras play the same programme, more or less, that they will play at the Edinburgh Festival, or concerts in the USA or Europe, a few days before or after the Proms, as part of their extensive summer tours.

[jonfan]

Nobody's advocated that, though. Have they? Read the points Ivan Hewett made.

At least 'aging clubbers' on a nostalgia fest is a good riposte to 'self-elected snobs'.

'Purist Proms' was from FF which I take to mean proms without the park events and such like attractions. I don't accept Hewett's assertions that there's a creeping conservatism in the programming and the first rule is high quality. Quality of performance now is extremely high but it wasn't Wood's original remit but rather performing good music to the widest audience at a cheap price. I think he called new music 'novelties'? Well we've had 30 of those this season.

[Nick Armstrong]

Not that one cannot be both!

[Zucchini]

This thread has been trashed.. It's about the Last Night. Maybe FF would like to start a Proms 2015 Review thread and take recent posts there.

[teamsaint]

I'm sure they used Wood to justify what they're doing. But looking at what Wood included, it doesn't appear that he included 'all manner of music' himself. None of the truly 'popular' of the day, like musical hall standards.

What is slightly troubling is that BBC Marketing (?) are now publicising the fact that 37,500 tickets were sold to 'first time Proms-goers'). Given that I can count 12 non-classical Proms at the RAH, and one at Cadogan Hall (and excluding Proms in the Park all round the country) and that, crucially, these are the ones that the BBC has been promoting for all its worth (with the BBC radio concerts, doing so more than ever before), it's not surprising that people are now reassured that the Proms are safe to come to as they're 'not just classical music'. Even the Last Night was publicised as a 'Sound of Music Sing-along

It's not yet clear which concerts the 37,500 tickets were for, but 12 sell-out concerts @ 5,000 seats would be 60,000, plus odds and ends (Sondheim at Cadogan, the Proms in the Park), there must have been not far short of 100,000 (?) inducements for first-time Proms-goers.

37500.

Take away unknown number of corporates on freebies.
Add unknowable number buying Arena and gallery day tickets.
Take away the number you first thought of.
Round up and use some equivocal language.

Answer : whatever you want it to be.


As for the non classical rep, ( is this the right thread,i lost track), just get rid of the pretence that they are anything other than revenue earners and helpful in making the Proms seem less "elitist" .

[french frank]

'Purist Proms' was from FF which I take to mean proms without the park events and such like attractions.

In was deliberately put in quotes; and read in context was simply a response to LMP's suggestion that without such 'sell-out' popular concerts, the rest of the concerts (i.e. 'purist Proms') would have a big deficit that would have to be paid for. It was not advocating that there should be such a return.

I don't accept Hewett's assertions that there's a creeping conservatism in the programming and the first rule is high quality.

He didn't assert that. Far be it from me to defend Hewett, but he merely said he feared that with the BBC now 'embattled' there could be a tendency for it to lean towards safety - and lead to a creeping conservatism.

Quality of performance now is extremely high

That bit of Hewett's article you could disagree with, if that was your wish: he spoke of the 'populist' concerts as not being of uniformly good quality. IOW, he was not objecting to the principle of the money-spinners: he merely wanted them to provide something fresh - and good.

[ahinton]

On the basis of the programme content I`d find it hard to judge Ms Alsop as a conductor (although her Naxos Brahms cycle didn`t stay long on my shelves) but I did like her way with the Elgar. However, could someone pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease tell Katie Derham to shut up???

People do - quite frequently, I believe; the problem is that she strictly doesn't take any notice and, sadly, no one at BBC seems prepared to enable this welcome possibility.

[pastoralguy]

People do - quite frequently, I believe; the problem is that she strictly doesn't take any notice and, sadly, no one at BBC seems prepared to enable this welcome possibility.

Even I, who is in a minority of one in having a soft spot for KD, wished she would tone it down just a bit...!

[Lat-Literal]

Randomly.......

I don't know how healthy Richard Baker is in 2015 but Nicholas Parsons is 91. When I think about the Proms these days, I feel I know exactly what to expect of the presentation. That may be the biggest problem. If few had any idea about what to expect of David Bedford on a children's television programme in 1971, then that was partially in the spirit of the performance of SCT's "Hiawatha" at the RAH in 1937. The mind goes to "ordinary" people speculating with some excitement on inner London streets about an event that was "apparently" to take place, not that it in reality was likely to have been quite as I describe. But to the extent that it may have been so, there is a strong feeling of colour. An all-knowing broadcaster and television audiences who have advanced qualifications in Expectations of Television tend to see everything - in spite of themselves - in black and white.

So this year's Last Night opened with Eleanor Alberga. On paper that's a promising start. But as has been revealed in a taking up of Beef Oven's excellent encouraging of us all to explore what is generally ignored across the Commonwealth, the options are limited. That is not simply due to the "fact" that, yes, most of western classical tradition beyond these isles in the "remit" is to be found in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. We do live in an advanced world now and yet somehow that is a point which even the global internet decides of itself not to reach. Having stated what is obvious, there is the counter-intuitive thought that so many aspects of this entire area of our lives are about confidence or the absence of it. Only now that the season has ended can I feel I have the confidence to elect in as I see fit. That is the beauty of the net. It enables one to have something of a personal experience. There isn't the alienation that comes from having it all channelled through that weird sort of tailoring to people who are not like me or us but rather both working in a supermarket and recalling a long lifetime in a professional orchestra. Well, that is what they are trying to do, isn't it? The average viewer as they see it isn't anyone real. He or she may or may not, of course, be currently residing in the United States. I fully appreciate that there is a need in this competitive digital era to combat any notion that NPR could on occasions offer better which, incidentally, it does as does ABC on a good day or night. And, yes, I am partial to Gershwin and I like Copland so much he is in the Top 5 of the chart I commissioned especially for myself to find out more about me. But I may just skip those soupcons of yesterday as I do prefer a Warfield on "I Bought Me a Cat".

Anyhow, the Telegraph alludes to the BBC's understanding that as products go, it has in the Proms a permanent rock. That is especially true of its finale. We are told that the worries about its own future standing, natch, may involve the risk that it will become increasingly conservative. That implies to me that this nation's broadcaster is now largely managed by very well paid types who are less firmly footed than a bunch of old time cockneys having a merry sing-a-long around the old joanna. I hope it isn't true because it would be rather sad. But do they know their audiences? Probably not - for when I look at the history of Wood's Proms on the BBC website, there is very little at all about the audience and nothing whatsoever about its composition in any era. I think we can all appreciate that this isn't the 1980s when one in five people who attended the Proms was a flag waving David Mellor which, while that could be very deeply upsetting, did at least guarantee plenty of Vaughan Williams. What today almost certainly lacks from far earlier times is the kind of innocent lack of education which provided opportunities for mere words on the street to lead to exploratory follow-up and unexpected experiences of sheer joy.

Regrettably, we are all victims now. There is a broad social pseudo-sophistication not for reasons of spite by well-meaning show makers but rather the marching on of technology. It is a headache for those in charge, a pain in the backside for people who are genuinely highbrow and inadvertently limiting for the more naive unless they can find a way of knowing how to prevent cultural life blood from being sucked out of them. The plus points are there is still a Proms, most people with responsibilities in that area are doing their best and they do find wider audiences. Here are details of the Last Night in the year of the birth of the host of Just A Minute which might just remind us all that Sir Henry balanced "I bought me a cat, my cat pleased me" with "My Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow" when there was a piano in every ordinary home and seriousness was casually permissible:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/efcbj5

[LeMartinPecheur]

In was deliberately put in quotes; and read in context was simply a response to LMP's suggestion that without such 'sell-out' popular concerts, the rest of the concerts (i.e. 'purist Proms') would have a big deficit that would have to be paid for. It was not advocating that there should be such a return.

That wasn't quite what I meant: should clearly have spelt it out less obliquely

If Controller Davey were to act decisively in an 'anti-populist'/ 'pro-elitist' direction, on Last Night or the Proms season as a whole, aren't the media likely to have a field-day in a way that would bring wider arts and BBC funding into the limelight, and pretty much guaranteed to give huge assistance to those wanting to minimize state funding for broadcasting and the wider arts?

Apologies if this is further 'trashing' of the thread. But it stems from many earlier posts bemoaning last night's "Proms in the Park", "Hello Belfast...", "Singalong Sound of Music" etc, etc.

Be very careful what you wish for, I feel

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Simply turned off Last Night. What a fantastic waste of the Kaufmann talent. And as for 'Sound of Music....'....

Don't blame The Sound of Music. It was the infantile gimmicks that were the problem there.

[MrGongGong]

It was the infantile gimmicks that were the problem there.

I thought you were keen on the "Sea Songs" ?

[french frank]

If Controller Davey were to act decisively in an 'anti-populist'/ 'pro-elitist' direction, on Last Night or the Proms season as a whole, aren't the media likely to have a field-day in a way that would bring wider arts and BBC funding into the limelight, and pretty much guaranteed to give huge assistance to those wanting to minimize state funding for broadcasting and the wider arts?

Bringing the wider arts and BBC funding into the limelight would surely show how *little* they spend on the arts, compared with, say, Glastonbury or R1 Big Weekend.

The BBC are ambivalent: one part of them knows that the Proms and Radio 3 are at the centre of what is thought of as 'public service broadcasting; but the other part has no interest in either of them and consequently concentrates the money and promotion on what's popular.

[Lat-Literal]

Bringing the wider arts and BBC funding into the limelight would surely show how *little* they spend on the arts, compared with, say, Glastonbury or R1 Big Weekend.

The BBC are ambivalent: one part of them knows that the Proms and Radio 3 are at the centre of what is thought of as 'public service broadcasting; but the other part has no interest in either of them and consequently concentrates the money and promotion on what's popular.

The Proms get more money than the other events - 2.5-3.0 times - but a tiny amount of money by comparison per day. I suppose a part of it is in what it takes to cover an area of countryside that needs three quarters of an hour to walk from one side to the other. Personally, I watch very little of it as the way in which it is presented is not how it is in reality.