Several possibilities.
1. We're all looking forward to it a lot, especially to hearing Susan Bullock and to witnessing - if it's filmed - Lang Lang's dizzy dash from park to platform.
2. We need something to celebrate at the moment, the Proms are worth celebrating and this is how they are traditionally celebrated. This has been a vintage year, to put it mildly.
3. The country is becoming more nationalistic as times grow harder.
4. The Last Night is finally being recognised for what it truly is: a bit of good old harmless fun to raise the spirits.
Which is your favourite explanation?
My music column for Standpoint's September issue is all about how special this year's Proms have been: virtually every concert was a talking point and a mini-festival in its own right. (This was written well before certain events last week, incidentally.)
Did you know that people care this much about classical music? They do. And in a world full of cyber-chatter, talking about what you care about has never been easier — or more important in spreading the message about its existence. Talking points at the Proms have been the festival's best marketing tool in years.Read the whole thing here. There's a very snazzy pic of The Dude on site.
2 comments:
There's something which puzzles me (I'm no longer in close contact with the English musical scene): the Proms always have been highly successful because of the unique, almost magical atmosphere in the Albert Hall, not to speak of the very reasonable prices, but what happens to this audience during the rest of the year? And why is it that the record industry is in such dire straits (according to many) with the sale of mp3s, with their inferior sound, not compensating for the loss of sales of the "old-fashioned" CDs, which are often sold off as cheaply as in some closing-down sale?
If anything, the whining of later about The Last Night is from the traditionalists kicking up hissy-fits about the omission of Sir Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs (which is fine with me, but then I'm an American), not the protestors about jingoism. Besides that, the latter may slowly have realized that The Last Night isn't going away, so they may as well live with it.
What would be kind of nice is if the conductor thanks also Robert Newman as well as Sir Henry Wood, for once, since without Robert Newman, there would have been no Proms and no Sir Henry Wood to steer them.
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