Bernard Haitink's encore piece was, appropriately enough, The Flying Dutchman overture."Scruffy" is an adjective that has cropped up with some frequency on the BBC Proms comments page this season, but unless the presenters let the side down again, I'm sure nobody will have flipped open their laptops on this occasion to gripe about the way the Royal Concertgebouw and their conductor laureate were turned out. The sartorial propriety of the orchestra was topped off with Haitink's supreme economy and elegance of gesture.
Along with Wagners' most soul-stirring concert pieces, the Parsifal prelude and Good Friday music and the prelude and 'liebestod' from Tristan und Isolde, they played Debussy's Nocturnes and Six épigraphes antiques (orchestrated by Rudolf Escher). The hall was humid with human perspiration and there was a quite scandalous amount of coughing and spluttering going on, even during Isolde's transfiguration. I myself had watery eyes, and not from holding back an untimely expectoration.
Afterwards I went to find Surfer at the Havelock Arms in Brook Green. He was with James Hart Dyke and a friend of his from art college, a pretty and sophisticated Polish girl. James was recently in Afghanistan with his sketchbook and the experience has put him off adventurous landscapes for a while, he noted rather ruefully. In Helmand Provice he had been hanging out with the Grenadier Guards whose officers apparently like to feed the rodents in camp with Fortnum's finest chocolates.
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