Prom 62: Beethoven's 9th

This pic of bomb damage to Bank Underground station in 1944 − the Central Line ticket office took a direct hit killing 58 people− was to have gone into tonight's programme in the section about Honneger's 3rd Symphony, but someone apparently thought it might offend the krouts, so it was pulled. The krouts in question, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus were there to give their rendition of Beethoven's 9th symphony, which was performed earlier in the season by the BBC Symphony.

This double whammy of the one absolutely non-negotiable item on the Proms programme was arranged in compensation for the 9th-less season of 2006, a situation which resulted after a concert was cancelled at short notice last year following a small fire which set off the sprinkler system which in turn shorted some of the electrics in the Royal Albert Hall. There were no casualties and no krouts were made to feel responsible, however indirectly.

Mariss Jansons conducted, on what looked like his own personal podium from IKEA. Michael Volle (bass) was the best of the soloists.

There were several people asleep around us during the Adagio. It is possibly in anticipation of this phenomenon that Beethoven elected to kick off his Recitative with such Waaaake up you f**kers detonation.

Dead Man's Hat sent TC a text message during the concert: "I hope you switched off your mobile!" She hadn't.

This was my final Prom. It's been fun and I haven't exactly been missing out on the long, hot summer evenings.

Prom 59: Tchaikovski and Prokofiev

My father finally discovered how to navigate through to BBC4 on SKY Digital and reported being most impressed with the dynamism of chubby little Georgian pianist Alexander Toradze, who came on to play Prokofiev's 2nd Piano Concerto. His enthusiasm was infectious and he leaped from his seat at the end of the Finale before the orchestra under Valery Gergiev (whose hair strands were surely the second most dynamic element of this performance) had played their final note.

When I saw the 1st Piano Concerto performed earlier in the season the orchestra tended to muffle both the lyricism and percussive aplomb of Prokofiev's music, but Toradze is very much in the tradition of unsparing Russian piano-bashers. I'm still convinced that BBC4 viewers were probably better able to appreciate the piece as the sound of the piano was no doubt more to the foreground, and they could witness the blur of Toradze's fingers across the keyboard.

The RAH was more packed than I had seen it all summer, yet judging by some of the chatter I could make out around me, some of the audience seemed oddly unenthusiastic for this particular programme. "Even Tchaikovsky didn't rate his Hamlet Fantasia Overture," muttered someone behind me during the cough break. Whilst I can appreciate Tchaikovski's music in the context of ballet and opera, but have never really been overjoyed by it in the concert hall.

The Romeo and Juliet Fantasia Overture was probably the main draw tonight for the middlebrows, but that was over and done with after the first thirty minutes and some fidgeting ensued during Prokofiev's 7th Symphony.The most bizarre aspect of this performance though was Gergiev's loud vocalisations during the andante expressivo. When they first started I couldn't see his face and had started to look around the orchestra for the hidden extra soloist. If I had started to hum like that the redcoats would have promptly ejected me.

Prom 55: Wagner and Debussy

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.

Prom 47: Fiesta Latina

This might have been the first Prom ever without a printed programme, for acclaimed violinist Maxim Vengerov had pulled out with a suspected something better to do, leaving the Beeb to scuttle round looking for a replacement set of artists and Latin American-themed compositions.

There are four distinctive cover designs for the 2007 Proms programmes, because the BBC deliver in batches four days in advance to the RAH, and the staff there have been known to get a bit confused by simple numbers and dates in the past.

For the first half of the concert we were in the hands of the LSO, whose chef d'orchestre for the evening was François-Xavier Roth. They kicked off with Copland's El Salón México inspired by a visit the composer made to a popular old dance hall in DF in 1932 and concluded their set with the Hoe-down from Rodeo. (Surfer thought the latter piece sounded rather Scottish, and it does in fact contain snatches of McLeod's Reel within the Bonypart square dance tune.)

In between they tackled dour Argie-modernism in the form of Piazzolla's Tangazo and the John Adams-arranged pieces La Mufa and Todo Buenos Aires. These last two featured a violin solo by Alina Ibragimova, who in my opinion was regretably drowned out by an orchestra that was just too big for this sort of music.

We were surrounded by the sort of earnest South American youth that frequent the Autumn film festivals, and some of these made the mistake of leaving during the 'short break' that the recently blow-dried programmes were at pains to advertise as 'not an interval'. They were therefore not permitted to return to their seats for the main draw: the Venezuelan Brass Ensemble (conducted by the intriguingly-named Thomas Clamor) who delighted the crowd with some solid fanfares interspersed with party pieces like Zequinha de Abreu's Tico Tico and Gershwin's I Got Rhythm, during which a good deal of booty was shaken by the musicians. They carried on until after midnight and the audience stamped and hooted their appreciation of every piece. One can only presume that the CD pictured above is well worth buying.

Whilst the LSO's listless-looking scratch board operative had seemed off-cue, the percussion section of this ensemble was everything you would expect from the land of Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías.

I was supposed to go to see Prom 48 the next day, but had myself to pull out with a suspected mid-afternoon hangover. However TC and I watched most of this on BBC4. Shostakovich's insistent tenth was played competently by the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela conducted by the flamboyantly self-effacing Gustavo Dudamel, and to my eye at least, incorporating several star members of the aforementioned percussion section from Prom 47.

Prom 39: Götterdämmerung

"Gutrune...is the only woman that Siegfried has ever come across who hasn't been his aunt."

I prepared myself for this 265 minute marathon by listening to Anna Russell's hilarious comedy synopsis of the Ring Cycle.

In the end I needn't have fretted so much as the six hours really seemed to whizz by. Given that it was a concert performance with no actual on-stage action, this is a testament to the tidal impetus of Wagner's music-drama. Sir John Tomlinson was particularly engrossing as bitter und twisted backstäbber Hagen.

You could sense the frisson of heightened attention around the hall when, midway through Act III, the famous funeral procession got under way. (The girl in front of me actually stuck her elbow into her boyfriend's ribs, just to make sure.) The combustion of Valhalla was later intimated by strobing some red lights at the acoustic diffusing disks high up in the dome.

This is I suppose the thinking person's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It's also an attempt to represent through myth the end of the rule of law. And like many libertarian radicals before and after him, Wagner hesiated to define the society that was to follow, but as cop-outs go, this one is magnificent.

There was a box-full of serious professional pseuds right behind me, quoting passages of Wagner's libretto with exaggerated teutonic trilling. "Hallair, who's playing Woe-tarn tonight?" asked one particularly badly-briefed pseud at the start of Act I.

The first interval lasted an hour: just long enough for me to find a pub within reasonable walking distance of the RAH...and to lose my wallet. Said pub, the Queen's Arms, (pictured below) was full of members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra with their tell-tale black suits and ties, which allowed me to time my return to my own seat to perfection.

Prom 29: Jay Kernis, Prokofiev and Shostakovich

"And he was so cold he stuck an axe in his foot and didn't notice."

Just another snippet of conversation overheard in the stalls of the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday night. There were certainly times during the second movement of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony (the Leningrad) that you could have stuck an axe in the head of some of the people sitting around me and I doubt they would have noticed much either.

Up until the conclusion of the first movement of that most stodgily socialist-realist of listening experiences, the mood had been one of exuberance, as the band on the dais that night was the 160-strong National Youth Orchestra and the first two pieces had been the notably zippy New Era Dance by Aaron Jay Kernis and Prokofiev's first piano concerto, a real favourite of mine. (Apparently those vigorous first four notes of the concerto were indeed later nicknamed po cherepoo: 'hit on the head')

At the start the conductor Mark Elder read from American composer Jay Kernis's own introduction to the New Era Dance, composed in 1992 as an evocation of the city of New York and "in anticipation of the new millennium to come in the year 2000, in hope for a time of imperative political and social change in this country." This drew some sniggers from the crowd.

The programme notes for the piece contained this classic line: "Please note: pistol shots will be fired during this performance." Looking to our own social issues, there weren't that many dark faces in this massive youth orchestra.

Shostakovich's dour 75-minute encomium to a city undone by enemies from both home and abroad took me back to the compulsory trip we made during our 1984 USSR tour to the Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery outside Leningrad, where 420,000 civilian casualties of the 'Great Patriotic War' are buried. However po-faced Americans get about Pearl Harbour and 9-11, this solemn mass-crypt out in the suburbs of St Petersburg really does seem to be ground zero for an incomparable sense of historical anguish and affront.

Middle England People's Revolutionary Front?

Any ideas what flag that is draped across a box at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday?

Prom 17: Delius, Tippett and Vaughan Williams

Just finished listening to the second half of this concert again on the R3 site.

Vaughan Williams's response to WWII was clearly very different to certain contemporaries like Shostakovich. Out went dissonance and turmoil and in came rousing, affirmative lyricism.

This singularly serene symphony − his fifth − was first performed at the Royal Albert Hall at a Prom on June 24, 1943. Perhaps my father was up in the gallery watching. He wouldn't remember now, but he's a fan of the composer.

There was however one significantly dissonant note during the performance last Thursday evening: someone had seen fit to bring their bronchitic child along and the poor little thing was the object of some gorgon stares from the rows behind.

English music from the twentieth century appeals to me on a level way down below the intellectual. Having spent all my life living in a central London flat before I went up to Cambridge, I took with me a rather canned sense of the flow of my country's seasons. The change I then experienced could be compared to the discovery of CDs by someone only accustomed to listening to classical music on scratchy old mono 78s.

In my final year I had a room at the far end of my college overlooking a field which contained rare-breeds of sheep. This belated HD exposure to pastoral phase changes occurred at a time when I came into close contact with the most nocturnal of the college cliques − the music students. And they too were all huge fans of these twentieth century Brits and their immediate artistic descendents.

So there is a complex set of associations at work here when I listen to one of their works − cycling through butterflies in a field of rape, and drink-fuelled debate back in the long-passed period of life when one stayed up all night for the sheer pleasure of it.

A Song of Summer by Delius was also composed using elements of an earlier discarded work. (A Poem of Love and Life) It was to be the composer's final orchestral score and as he was already blind and paralysed from tertiary syphilis, it was partially dictated to his collaborator Eric Fenby. The BBC Symphony Orchestra's Conductor Laureate Andrew Davis was on hand last week to make sure that the strings were up to delivering the trademark Delius tremulousness.

Michael Tippett's radiant Triple Concerto is the kind of piece you can play over and over with little fear of quickly running out of new things to listen out for. Its movements − linked by interludes of what the composer liked to call non-music − track the life cycle: be it that of our whole span or a single rapturous switch from day to night and back again.

The final movement betrays the influence of Balinese gamelan, but it is the mid-section that I keep returning to, as it plucks my consciousness right back to any number of dreamy, balmy mid-summer twilights. (Though to one or two in particular, again during that Cambridge period when my own life's second movement had just got going.)

The field with the sheep is now a car park.

Prom 15: Macbetto

"La vita... che importa?...E' il racconto d'un povero idiota;Vento e suono che nulla dinota!"

"If we'd seen that at Glyndebourne we'd have been very angry," said one dodderer to another as they shuffled their way out through the G Stalls bottleneck. I'm not sure why they'd reached that conclusion, but maybe it had something to do with the kilts and cardboard boxes.

The Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the London Philharmonic (conducted by Vladimir Jurowski) had just performed a semi-staged version of Verdi's 1865 opera, which switched to the discarded 1847 ending for Macbeth's death scene. It was the first of this season's Proms that I have attended that was close to a sell-out.

As ever the audience was generally close to (and in some cases well past) their sell-by date. During the interval they hovvered around like unpredictable human obstacles looking for things to fiddle with.

I'd not seen (or heard) this opera before, and whilst Otello has in a way added to my appreciation of Shakespeare's story, I'm not so sure in this case. Macbeth is probably my favourite of the tragedies, but it is very dark − there's not a single moment of unadulterated joy − and for the first couple of acts it seemed to me that Verdi had struggled to compose the appropriate soundtrack for the malignant turmoil inside the heads of the usurper and his wife. The balletic third act nevertheless provides an original twist on the source scenes.

Most of the cast and chorus were in dayglo tartan, the kind that you'd expect to come across as the uniform of a new Scottish no-frills carrier. The witches and assassins meanwhile were got up like the folk with whom I shared a bus-shelter in Paisley last month.

(Andrzej Dobber − pictured − sang the lead.)

TC tells me that in the original Glyndebourne production "the choir is inside a caravan, that arrives from nowhere (and with no recognizable purpose) and keeps coming in and out in order to sing." A caravan full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They'd certainly have been angry about that.

Prom 7: Pärt, Rachmaninov and Glière

Confusion over our seat allocation saw me negotiating with the press officer for one more ticket and I ended up at the end of row 8 in area G, practically in the percussion section of the BBC Philharmonic. And this was really the place to be for a unique perspective on Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini. The man with the gong was practically standing next to me!

Argie-born Nelson Goerner was at the piano with Vassily Sinaisky conducting. Like his orchestra he was in a white tux and looked a bit like a Maitre D in a grand French hotel. The Philharmonic are Manchester based and most of them were outside puffing away during the interval.

The second half was taken up with Reinhold Glière's bloated third symphony, Ilya Muromets. Oh God...Eighty minutes! I heard someone writing it off as 'unstructured' when we were leaving the Royal Albert Hall, but in fact it has a very clear dramatic line. This is myth-making music imagined in the last years before the arrival of cinema.

The highlight of the evening was Arvo Pärt's Cantus en memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977), an ethereal piece which descends along on an A minor spiral, apparently a seminal example of what the composer calls his tintinnabuli technique:

Prom 5: Hayden, Bernstein and Ives

The original venue for the Proms, The Queen's Hall on Langham Place, was taken out by a single incendiary bomb in 1941. It was considered to have exemplary acoustics, unlike the Royal Albert Hall where they resumed for the latter years of the war.

When my father returned in 1943 after his evacuation to Kansas City, he spent a couple of summers watching the concerts from high up in the gallery until he turned 18 and had to sign-up.

These days the audio experience at the RAH has been slightly improved by the large fibreglass acoustic diffusing discs (AKA "mushrooms" or "flying saucers") which were installed in 1969 - pictured.

This Prom was mostly American-themed and attracted a sparser yet slightly less sandalled audience.

It began with the world premiere of Sam Hayden's Substratum. Of it the post-minimalist/newly complex composer says, "I try and find a metaphor that says something meaningful about the structure of the piece itself … In Substratum there's a sense of there being an underlying layer of material, on top of which everything else is generated, and is related to, in some fundamental sense". A complex din.

This was followed by Bernstein's Symphony No 2, The Age Of Anxiety, which apart from one or two flourishes from the piano soloist sounded rather dated. I know this is a criticism that could be levelled at all 'Classical' music, but somehow this piece just didn't seem to have any of the requisite timeless relevance.

Then there was Charles Ives's Fourth symphony, which I think I might have enjoyed more with my eyes shut as the rather awkward stageing it seems to require was constantly grabbing my attention during the performance. (Two pianos, two conductors and a 'distant' ensemble of harps and violins.) It evokes both the transcendental grandeur of many of the great symphonies that came before it and the reduced accessibility of those that were to follow during the rest of the twentieth century. Its final movement is especially compelling.

Prom 4: Berio and Rossini

It was Italian night at the RAH. Which means gladly tapping your foot to a jolly tenor aria with lyrics like Christ above in torment hangs.

But those that essentially came for Rossini's sing-song sacred piece Stabat Mater had of course to endure 35 minutes of Luciano Berio's unusual Sinfonia from 1968 which is, in modern parlance, a mash-up.

Members of the BBC freeloaders club around me were none too pleased with the postmodern pre-interval entertainment. "It puts people off," one lady suggested. "I prefer something with a tune." Another piped up to say that she did in fact recognise the tune in the fourth movement of the Sinfonia...but then that's because it's been lifted from Mahler's second.

I would refer them all to The Modern World's review, which involves a bit of a metaphoric mash-up itself: "The syllables float above a layer of shimmering music, piling up like clouds of incense, with frequent spikes of brass and piano shooting through the haze like needles."

Antonio Pappano (great fun to watch) conducted the Academy of Santa Cecilia from Rome, an Italian orchestra, which meant there were a few lookers in the string section, but most of the blokes resembled either Umberto Eco or Umberto Eco with great hair. No Mexican waves from the chorus this time.

Years ago when I worked in the sheet music department at Foyles I had a conversation with an author who had produced an odd little book detailing the medical conditions of all the great composers. They were generally not a healthy bunch, with Chopin deserving a special mention for even making it out of childhood. But the one with the most known chronic illnesses at his time of death was in fact Gioachino Rossini.

As I was leaving I overheard a German visitor describing the Proms as "wery pricey koncertz for the dinosauer set." I'm rejoining the promosauruses tonight for the American-themed programme including Bernstein and Ives.

Berio's Sinfonia for 8 voices and orchestra:

Prom 3: Campra and Rameau

No gain without pain seems to be the abiding principle behind the BBC's PROM programmes. The piece or pieces you really came to hear are rarely given the pre-interval slot.

And so this generally white and occasionally sandal-wearing middle-aged crowd had to endure the muted melancholy of Campra's Requiem before they could begin to roar their approval for the underprivileged kids from South Africa's townships that joined John Elliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists in their hour-long celebration of the music of Jean Phillipe Rameau. (A passing mention here for the HIP − historically influenced performance − of the Compagnie Roussat-Lubek, a dance troupe consisting mainly of young French girls of the gamine variety.)

Noting the absence of Rameau's catchy Danse des Sauvages, I nevertheless suspected the potential here for the kind of uncomfortable spectacle reminiscent of the Jesuits teaching the Guaraní indians to play European stringed instruments in the great South American missions (as seen in Roland Joffé's 1986 film The Mission), but in fact something very interesting occured: when the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble and Dance for All (many in full warrior garb) merged with the main orchestra and Mexican-waving Monterverdi choir for the finale, their own artistic 'liberation' was less at the forefront than the liberating effect they seemed to have on the usually more confined configuration of classical performance.

And Rameau has proved to be the catalyst for such a revelation. There is surely no composer before Beethoven (and perhaps indeed after) whose compositions reward such enthusiastic physicality in their rendition. My first exposure to Rameau's music was back in 1987 when I went to see Aria, a collaboration between Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford and several other fairly experimental directors. Each had made a short film around their favourite operatic aria. Derek Jarman memorably chose Depuis le jour from Charpentier's Louise. Altman himself selected a segment from Rameau's final opera Les Boréades and I found the rhthymic innovation utterly captivating.

It seems that when Rosemary Nalden turned up in Soweto with her violins the musically-inclined kids she gathered there at first tended to find classical composers like Mozart and Haydn a bit of a struggle. Only when works by Rameau were introduced into their repertoire did the programme really take off. Go and listen...