A worldly triumph full of silliness and beauty
CLASSICAL CRITIC
The Last Night is normally a jolly display of love among the nations. It’s Beethoven’s message of “all men will be brothers”, recreated at the level of Union flag hats and a myriad of national flags. But this Last Night threatened to be different. The pro-Brexit millionaire Arron Banks had paid for 10,000 Union flags to be distributed to the audience. This was in response to antiBrexit campaigners who wanted to “show solidarity with the EU” by handing out thousands of EU flags.
So was it going to be a surly Battle of the Flags, with mingled boos and cheers every time a British piece hove into view? A clue was offered by the woman in the Prommers’ queue waving an odd combination of Union Jack and European flag, with a Welsh dragon clinging to the flag pole. “Europa, St Georgina and Harry!” she cried, at intervals. We could all relax. Last Night silliness was going to nip any incipient hostilities in the bud.
In fact it was music that laid its spell first. Things kicked off with a new piece, Raze, from Tom Harrold which was too louche and darkly urban in its rhythms to come within a million miles of traditional Last Night jollity. It was dispatched with tremendous rhythmic attack by the BBC Proms Youth Ensemble, conducted by the evening’s master-of-ceremonies and conductor Sakari Oramo.
There was traditional jollity later in the first half, in the shape of Britten’s Rossini-inspired Matinées Musicales, where Oramo showed a nice sense of comic timing. But there were also some beautifully calm and quiet moments. George Butterworth’s Banks
of Green Willow unfolded in a tranced haze, while Jonathan Dove’s Our
Revels Now Are Ended wrapped Prospero’s last speech from The
Tempest in a choral murmuration. That was the first of the evening’s homages to Shakespeare. The second came in Vaughan Williams’s Serenade
to Music, that mystical and yet very human paean to the “music of the spheres”. It was sung with rapturous beauty by 16 young singers brought together for the occasion, alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
No Last Night is complete without a star, and the Proms found a shining one in the shape of Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez. He can still hit those top notes with ringing clarity, as he showed in Ah mes amis! from Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment. And he showed an unexpected affinity for Proms silliness, when he addressed a sentimental Latin American song to a Paddington bear, and sang Rule
Britannia in the glowing red-and-gold regalia of an Aztec king (pictured left). But his real art was displayed in Donizetti’s Una furtiva lagrima, which he turned with prefect lyrical grace.
So it was another fine Last Night, with more moments of reflectiveness than usual, unmarred by pro or antiBrexit spats. Music embraces the world; it’s too big for a quarrel about the fate of this small island.