Proms 2018

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Given the current propensity of R3 and CFM, amongst others, to play single-movement extracts from longer pieces, this seems to me to be a reasonable assumption, if only because some of those people may well not appreciate that the work as a whole consists of more than they have just heard.

My father once clapped in the middle of Die Zauberflöte Overture. (I sitting next to him. He was terribly embarrassed.)

[Beef Oven!]

I was laying bets on when this particular post was coming.

MrGG, I'm disappointed. It was first brought up several days ago in another Proms thread.

Disappointed? You're contradicting the rest of your post!

[LMcD]

This subject is also under discussion on the 'Proms 2018' thread.

[MrGongGong]

I was laying bets on when this particular post was coming.

MrGG, I'm disappointed. It was first brought up several days ago in another Proms thread.

Been a bit busy
doing gigs and the like
but nice to see it come round like Easter, Birthdays and complaints about Christmas starting too early

[french frank]

Disappointed? You're contradicting the rest of your post!

Not necessarily. Alpie bet it would have turned up on the other thread, but he lost his bet

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Not necessarily. Alpie bet it would have turned up on the other thread, but he lost his bet

[ahinton]

Without giving away my thoughts on this subject, I would neverthless suggest that the answer from a composer's point of view is to write pieces in only one movement.

[jayne lee wilson]

It may be more interesting to ask why some performances draw interstitial applause (e.g. the Leningrad Symphony) and others don't (not a scrap of it during Turangalîla...)...

[peterthekeys]

She seems to be living in a happy world where everyone is honest and genuine. If only.

Funny that I've known several people who were severely critical of the BBC, then started working for the BBC and suddenly became overwhelmingly and gushingly enthusiastic about the BBC and everything it did. I do wonder sometimes what goes on in the induction process ...

[Zucchini]

"Restraining enthusiasm, especially in the young, is a sure way to stifle it …"
Letter to Times from Vienna re applause

[peterthekeys]

It may be more interesting to ask why some performances draw interstitial applause (e.g. the Leningrad Symphony) and others don't (not a scrap of it during Turangalîla...)...

Yes, I noticed that also - not even after "Joie du sang des etoiles". Very puzzling. Another oddity was the amount of shuffling, coughing and fidgeting throughout the piano cadenza at the start of Turangalila II (maybe Angela Hewitt just decided to get it over with. I didn't feel that it was her natural environment: she was badly out of sync with the orchestra on several occasions, and some of her birdsong sounded as though she was trying to hammer nails into a board.)

[teamsaint]

Never a good idea to alienate your core market.

Chi-Chi has this badly wrong I’m afraid. The people in the halls are not some kind of enemy. They are the ones paying to help keep the music alive( and musicians in jobs) and are almost certainly well onside with what Chineke! doing. Everybody I speak to at these kinds of events enjoys the relative informality, and writes off the odd bit of unwanted applause as a price worth paying for the reach that the featival has.
If there are enemies, they are elsewhere. This, like SKs unwarranted attack on classical audiences last year, smack of PR and careerism.

And the Proms, comparitively, draws a pretty diverse audience, certainly compared to somewhere like the Barbican.

A better approach might have been to write an article highlighting the aspects of the Proms which do help to spread the word. Ticket price, informality, availability of tickets, world class performers, an enquiring, diverse and relatively young audience ( certainly in the arena). And something that people come to this country to experience.

More positivity, in fact.

[MrGongGong]

Chi-Chi has this badly wrong I’m afraid.

I think she is spot on

Two years ago, a BBC podcast on the Proms found overwhelming opposition to clapping between movements. This snootiness is probably the main reason why many of my family and close friends simply stopped coming to concerts: they were made to feel alienated, or that they had committed a cardinal sin by spontaneously and genuinely bursting into applause at the end of a passage they loved.

So many senior figures in classical music say they want to attract more people from diverse backgrounds. Yet the attitude that concertgoers must be educated to behave in a traditional manner is getting in the way. In fact, it’s actually ignorant to suggest pin-drop silence between movements is “traditional”: revered composers such as Mozart, Brahms and Tchaikovsky dined out on the amount of cheering and clapping they could elicit between movements.

It’s absolutely fantastic to be on the receiving end of rapturous and spontaneous applause, wherever it happens, and woefully depressing to hear half-hearted, polite clapping because the “educated” audience knows a piece has come to the end, regardless of whether they enjoyed it or not. Give me between-movement clapping any day. After all, people would not clap if they did not like what they saw and heard.

The "core market" isn't those who try to impose their own nonsense... the sooner the whole "heave ho" crowd die off the bettr IMV

[teamsaint]

I think she is spot on







The "core market" isn't those who try to impose their own nonsense... the sooner the whole "heave ho" crowd die off the bettr IMV

Who is imposing what?
Nobody.

Certainly not those who invest time, money and effort into going to live music, to , incidentally , support musicians.

Wanting people to die off isnt very nice , is it ? And FWIW the musical charities probably do some good work with the £120k a year the heave ho types raise.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

WIthout giving away my thoughts on this subject, I would neverthless suggest that the answer from a composer's point of view is only to write pieces in one movement.

Mendelssohn did that for this precise reason.