| Subject: Re: last night of the proms 2001 - changes |
Author:
Simon
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Date Posted: 17:32:33 14/09/2001
In reply to:
WILLIAM CRASTER
's message, "last night of the proms 2001 - changes" on 15:22:21 14/09/2001
I can also respect your point of view, something everyone should be trying to do at the moment. Witness the sickening episode of Question Time on BBC1 last night as evidence of the results of not doing so.
I don't agree with it though. All the regular proms season attendees I've spoken to (and this seems to apply to many contributors on the thread below too) agree to a greater or lesser extent that the programme couldn't be appropriately left as it normally is. Can you seriously abide the concept of the Sailor's Hornpipe being played on Saturday, even hopefully minus hooters, stamping, party poppers, shouting and screaming and all the rest of it? Or the words of Rule Britannia exhorting us to "rule the waves", as in seek and retain global domination? Or the rotund jollity of Pomp and Circumstance 1? Singing of Land of Hope and Glory is on the border IMHO (again words like "wider still shall our bounds be set" exhorting us to strive for global domination).
The real problem I have with all this is that the Last Night of the Proms is not a political event. It's a concert of classical music, designed to bring to an end 73 consecutive concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. The concept of an alternative TV operator for the last night seems bizzarre. The BBC runs, subsidises and provides many of the orchestras and conductors for the entirety of the Proms, all 73 of them, including the 1/73rd that is the last night.
Nor is Kenyon a politician. He's the director of a classical music festival. The Last Night now aims (not necessarily very satisfactorily) to be a classical music concert which expresses sadness, solidarity, hope etc. through the medium of some of the classical music which is associated with these things.
Kenyon, American conductor Leonard Slatkin, the BBC management etc seem to have made the "mistake" of treating the last night under these circumstances as a concert forming the finale to a great classical music festival, and to make it musically appropriate. They should have realised that it's a massive hot potato, politicised in every possible different way, and widely regarded as nothing to do with the Proms as such.
Whatever they do is bound to be wrong since the last night is felt to be the "property" of so many different groups of people with different perspectives and beliefs. The music lovers who make up the core of the audience for those 73 concerts, those who are occasional attendees, those who have only ever been to the last night, a whole myriad of people who do not really identify the last night as being part of a vastly larger festival, political organisations, the lot. I would hate to have to try to strike any kind of balance to accomadate the wishes of such a huge spectrum.
The single person whose views are most relevant on the issues is conductor Leonard Slatkin (an American by birth, a USA citizen and resident, long time conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra Washington DC, a renowned Anglophile, chief conductor of London's BBC Symphony orchestra). I cannot believe that he will be prepared to do or not do anything which does not meet with his approval at present.
Having said all of that, I've been persuaded by the many arguments I've read that more community songs should have been included in the revised programme, further that Beethoven 9 isn't really a good idea. Possibly the reinstatement of a sombre rendition of Land of Hope and Glory minus the march sections that surround the sung parts. Not Rule Britannia though, it's far too arrogant, triumphalist and glorying to be appropriate. This is just my view, there will be literally thousands of others.
That's surely the point. It's an impossible decision. Whatever they chose would be widely viewed as wrong to a greater or lesser extent. I'm sure Nicholas Kenyon was expecting to get widely slagged-off no matter what he did (or rather for the decisions of which he is the public face). He will not be surprised to see that this is the case.....
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