last night of the proms reviews

The newest music on offer in the Last Night was the opening scene from Thomas Adès’s 2004 opera, The Tempest, a wonderful, rollicking sea-storm of an overture, its dark waves and undertow magnificently recreated by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by JirÍ Belohlávek.

So, how would the Prommers take to their new maestro? This was Belohlávek’s first Last Night, and it was hardly a baptism by fire. He signed in with the Othello overture by his Czech compatriot, Dvorák. And then he reminded us that The Entry of the Gladiators, that audacious march with which clowns roll and tumble into the big top, was actually written by a pupil of Dvorák, Julius FucÍk. As it raced along, the Prommers at last started bobbing up and down, as an airborne parrot levitated towards the dome, and Belohlávek called for three cheers for Sir Malcolm Sargent.

The warm and decorous cries of “Hip, hip hooray!” epitomised the unusually gentle, olde-worlde, home-sweet-homeliness of this Last Night. The Prommers didn’t bait Belohlávek, and he didn’t bait them. His speech was a disarmingly diffident and dignified eulogy of the Prommers own “profound and passionate love for this wonderful event”, garnished with gentlemanly greetings to those cities linked by big screen to the Albert Hall. These links provided one of the evening’s real coups: the echoing responses from buglers far and wide to the bugle calls at the start of Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea-Songs. And – to reassure everyone that this really was a party - the soprano Anna Netrebko, who had held a hushed auditorium in the palm of her hand for the closing scene from Bellini’s La Sonnambula, sang, danced, and scattered red roses throughout her aria Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss from Léhar’s Giuditta.

And, of course, Elgar. Not only Pomp and Circumstance, but a moving vignette from the First World War, in the first Proms performance of The Fourth of August from The Spirit of England, magnificently sung by the tenor Andrew Kennedy with the BBC Symphony Chorus.

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