Nostalgic tone helps to soothe Brexit tensions
Last Night of the Proms
Royal Albert Hall
One can only imagine the anxiety in the Proms director’s office, when it came to planning this year’s Last Night. The Proms are the BBC’S own institution, so they have to be “neutral”, but there’s a problem with that. Brexit has put paid to the myth that the Last Night is “apolitical”. In 2016 and 2017 we knew which side everyone was on, thanks to the flag-sellers, and this year the ideological divisions seemed sharper.
The Remainers donned stylish blue berets with gold stars, and in the queues during the afternoon the stand-off between the crowd laughing at a comedian doing a “Boris Johnson” and the opposing groups of Brexiteers was noticeable. Perhaps this Last Night wouldn’t be so good-humoured.
Faced with a potential problem, Proms director David Pickard took the only way out: he drowned the sharp political issue in the deep waters of nostalgia. Often the Last Night includes a clutch of sea songs hymning the derring-do of our Navy. This year we had no less than eleven, five from Charles Stanford – his stirring Songs of the Sea – and six from Henry Wood, in the shape of his arrangements of sea shanties. The centenary of the First World War offered an excuse for a singalong of four First World War songs, skilfully arranged by Anne Dudley. Hubert Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens and Stanford’s The Blue Bird – the BBC Chorus and Singers in fine voice – also served to waft us back to an earlier era, when British identity didn’t need to be debated. All this meant that when the final clutch of national songs came along – Rule, Britannia! and the rest – there wasn’t the usual jolt, as we moved from concert to celebration. The transition felt perfectly seamless.
There were many other things in the programme to dissipate any lurking ideological tensions among the flag-wavers. Eighteen-year-old saxophonist Jess Gillam gave a sassy but also subtly moulded performance of Milhaud’s delightful Scaramouche.
Roxanna Panufnik’s Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light, combined a First World War poem and lines from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet in a mood of mournful, eastern-flavoured tenderness. Baritone Gerald Finley provided the evening’s emotional heart, in his rendition of the Soliloquy from Carousel. Leading all this was conductor Andrew Davis, back on the Last Night podium after an interval of 12 years. As he cracked jokes and wagged his finger at the “naughty” Prommers, it felt as if he’d never been away. He embodied the nostalgic tone of the evening in his own person, so inviting him to lead this Last Night was perhaps the shrewdest move of all.