Traditionally the event that closes the Summer "Social Season" for our little gang - not that there has been any "Season" to speak of, what with the cancellation of traditional highlights such as Eurovision (although there was a "socially-distanced" evening of programmes by way of replacement), Gay Pride and every live theatre or musical event in town - it will be interesting to see how the Beeb deals with tonight's Last Night of the Proms. There has already been a furore over the threatened rewriting of the lyrics of Jerusalem, and that instrumental-only versions of the classic patriotic finale numbers Rule, Britannia! and Land Of Hope And Glory would replace singers, but apparently the over-cautious PC-mongers at the BBC have been forced to go back on their original statement and they will now be sung in full.
Even without the usual flag-waving audience of Promenaders, I hope they do them justice. Lord knows, we need something to make us proud to be British once in a while...
We'll be singing along at home (via Zoom or otherwise)!
In the end I think the BBC did Sir Henry Wood proud and found the evening both uplifting and moving.
ReplyDeleteCould have done without the "Gogglebox"-style viewer interaction stuff [It was reminiscent of a sports broadcast where every single bit of each performance had to have someone critiquing it, like an autopsy; who cares what Mel Giedroyc or a footballer thinks?], and, as predicted the "modern" rehash of Jerusalem was shit [thankfully they sang it properly afterwards]. However, the performances from the soprano Golda Schultz, the much-reduced orchestra, Nicola Benedetti's Lark Ascending solo, and the BBC choir were all brilliant - and we all sang along and waved our flags, so it was a good night after all! Jx
DeleteThey should have simply shown a repeat from the seventies and been done with it. It would have been fun!
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The BBBC repeats enough these days, it's true - but to be fair, the first six weeks of Proms were all repeats of archive performances, but the last fortnight was live, so I guess everyone would have been disappointed if they had failed to provide anything live on the very last finale... Jx
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