Magnificent Aurora

I do sometimes wonder why I put myself through the stress of going to the Proms every year. It is necessary to buy ticket(s) against a massive demand… This year, the online box office opened on Saturday 16 May at 9.00 am. I was logged in some minutes beforehand, and on the stroke of 9, I was allocated number 13,500 in the queue. (The year before last, I was number 48,500). It took an hour and 35 minutes before I was able to make my purchases; fortunately, the dates and seats I wanted were still available. Sometimes, you have to accept a different seat; sometimes, the concert is sold out.
 
Then you have to get yourself to the Albert Hall, a venue too big, the wrong shape, and arguably in the wrong place. Perhaps the latter point is a slight exaggeration. The hall and the nearest Underground station, South Kensington, were built around the same time and just happened to be half a mile from each other. As a convenience to concert goers, as well as visitors to the Natural History and Victoria and Albert museums, situated halfway between (the Science Museum was built much later), an underground walkway was built. Because, I assume, of the heat, this has been closed on the last two occasions this year when I have gone to concerts. South Kensington Station was like a war zone. There were thousands of people entering, and thousands trying to leave, with the ticket barriers hopelessly overwhelmed by the crush. Half the foreign tourists in London seemed to be visiting the museums… This was so bad on my penultimate visit, that I had determined to take the Piccadilly Line to Knightsbridge and get a bus along Kensington Road to the hall. Fortunately, I thought to check the status of the Underground. “Piccadilly Line partially suspended between Heathrow Airport and Cockfosters, the rest of the line operating normally.” I grew up on that line, and I know it quite well; Heathrow to Cockfosters is the entire length of the line! Someone at TFL was taking the proverbial. (I realized later that there is a short branch at the western end between Ealing Common and Uxbridge; I assume that it was that bit that was ‘operating normally’.) 
 
Even in normal weather, the walkway is closed well before most concerts end in the evening, so around two thousand people hike down Exhibition Road to the station having to cross the busy dual-carriageway Cromwell Road. The worst hazard though is just after that, a surprisingly busy crossroads between Exhibition Road and Thurlow Place. It has controlled crossings, but many people seem to think that because it is quite small after the dual carriageway, they can ignore the lights. I have seen numerous near-misses here, usually after dark, and it is compounded by cyclists, mostly rentals, who seem to think that the lights do not apply to them. Last week a middle-aged couple crossed against a red light, came within a whisker of being totalled by a taxi, and then nearly knocked me over as I was crossing on a green man. When I enquired whether the man was colour-blind, he responded with the answer to that well-known crossword clue: four and three, beginning and ending in ‘F’...
 
All of these difficulties fade out of sight once you finally get into your seat. I usually arrive early, so the hall is almost empty. I read somewhere that the builders of the great medieval cathedrals understood how to inspire awe with a great building, and that is what the Albert Hall achieves. The ground plan is of an elliptical amphitheatre, with the stage at one end of the long axis of the ellipse, and seating for around 5,500 people. The size means that it has an unfortunate reverberating echo—unavoidable, given the dimensions and the speed of sound—although this has been mitigated by hanging a number of great sound-absorbing ‘mushrooms’ from the roof. (The best shape for a concert hall is a rectangle; viz Snape Maltings, or the Musikverein in Vienna). For yesterday’s concert, I was sitting very close to the left side of the orchestra, and the echo was quite noticeable. Nevertheless, the shared excitement of the Proms—presided over by the bust of the founder, Henry Wood—and the three-dimensional sound and visual experience of live music is quite spiritual in its effect; it certainly is to me.
 
And so to the music. The first Prom I attended this year was Mahler’s sixth symphony, the so-called Tragic. It is not a piece I am familiar with, although there were some parts I recognized. The orchestration is so complex and varied that it is fascinating watching the different instruments doing their stuff. The most extraordinary effect was the Crack of Doom, repeated a couple of times. An enormous mallet held high above the percussionist’s head was brought down with enormous force onto a large wooden chest. I could not help noticing that the timpanist standing in front had ear defenders in, which he removed after each detonation.
 
Last Wednesday’s Prom had two ‘new’ pieces in the first half. One was a world premiere, The World’s Wife, by Brett Dean. This had a lively and attractive female soprano who proceeded to introduce each of five quite weird songs by speaking in a funny voice as though she were addressing a class of infants. The other piece was Moon and Star by Judith Weir, complete with a substantial choir, and also quite weird. In each case the composer was in the audience just a few seats away from me and stood to receive their applause at the end. Apparently, Judith Weir was a sometime Master of the King’s Music. I do wonder how often such pieces ever get a second performance… 
 
But it was the second half with Elgar’s first symphony that was the joy. As it started, I felt as though I was being wrapped in a gloriously melodic comfort blanket that soothed away the worries of the world. It is a rather tired cliché, but there is something so reassuringly English about some of Elgar’s music. I was so transported that I lost count of the movements and fell into a sort of hypnosis. I suddenly came to as I realised that we were nearing the finale and I experienced a feeling that I have never had before in a concert: I wanted to listen to the whole thing again there and then…
 
It was last night’s concert that was the peak, and I fear that the next two Proms might be an anticlimax. The Aurora Orchestra with their conductor Nicholas Collon specialize in playing from memory without sheet music. Most of the musicians stand and can move as the music takes them. Not infrequently they move around the stage. Yesterday they were doing Gustav Mahler’s first symphony, a piece I know quite well. In the first half they did a dramatized deconstruction of the piece, with an actor playing Mahler and speaking the composer’s words assembled from existing correspondence and diaries. The format was in the form of an interview with a psychologist (who, although played by a woman, turned out to be Sigmund Freud), interspersed with extracts from the music, and narrated by the conductor. I found it mesmerizing. There was a comparison of Mahler’s rendering of a cuckoo’s call with that of Beethoven in his sixth symphony and Saint-Saëns in the Carnival of the Animals. A soprano came on and sang part of an earlier song whose melody Mahler had borrowed for his symphony. The most memorable part was an analysis of the funeral march based on the tune of Frère Jacques. Collon divided up the Proms audience and had us singing Frère Jacques in rounds just as I remember doing at school. Listen on iPlayer, and you can hear me singing live at the Proms—along with around 5,500 others... He explained many other elements including trumpet calls from a nearby barracks, and a jaunty Bohemian band interrupting the funeral march. It was a real revelation.
 
I had exchanged a few words with a lady of a certain age sitting near me, and I commented during the interval how wonderful the first half was. “I thought it was awful!” she said. Crushed, I mumbled something about Jack Sprat, sighed audibly, and went to buy an ice cream…
 
The symphony when it was performed in the second half was superlative. My seat was very close to the orchestra, in line with conductor, so I could see his every movement and facial expression. This was a mixture of joy and excitement. I have heard the piece many times and at least once in a live performance, also at the Proms. Perhaps it was the wonderful analysis in the first half explaining so much of the structure and the meaning of the various sections; possibly it was the sheer exuberance of the players liberated from having to sight-read music for the performance—combined with the excellent and original Collon, but this was an evening I shall remember for a very long time. Real food for the soul. It more than explains why, year after year, I do bother with the Proms.