In Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, a wealthy man commissions an evening’s entertainment: a lofty new opera and a comic burlesque. But when time constraints force them to be performed simultaneously, surreal musical chaos ensues. One can only assume that the BBC was taking notes.
The Last Night of the Proms is the finale to eight weeks of concerts, and the BBC’s annual identity crisis. Is this the celebratory end to a season of serious music or a standalone party, whose first half is something to be endured before the real fun begins? It’s both, of course. And that’s where the trouble starts.
Consider the running time of nearly four hours. That’s longer than Rheingold, pushing into Tristan und Isolde territory: a bloated classical variety performance where all shall have prizes (this year even, perhaps to her heavenly surprise, Dolly Parton) and no music shall be left behind – not even Samuel Barber’s inscrutable, gruffly virtuosic 1962 Piano Concerto. Try waving your flag to that.
But try the audience did. There’s a place in musical hell for the person who let off a howling rocket balloon just as the soaring central theme of Holst’s Jupiter began, and again in the ravishing cello solo of Tom Bowling, but you can hardly blame the steady trickle of walkouts during piano megastar Yuja Wang’s stylish, near-superhuman account of the Barber, nor the restless, pre-emptive burst of applause at the not-end of Smetana’s Vltava.
The conductor, Sakari Oramo, the evening’s ever-genial MC, offered us an alternative definition of AI during his traditional speech: Artistic Integrity. When the night got it right it sang off the stage: in the sardonic dances of Alexander Tsfasman’s Soviet-era Jazz Suite (Wang back as a dazzling blur of a soloist, with a little help from Richard Hosford’s outrageous solo clarinet), in the lightly worn choral excellence of the BBC Singers delivering the world premiere of Anne Dudley’s Iris of Life, and roaring and blazing from tenor Nicky Spence.
Has any Last Night soloist better understood the assignment? Whether giving us heartfelt heroism in the Prince’s aria from Rusalka or Broadway pizzazz in Guys and Dolls’ Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat (complete with hip flask and New York accent) or a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tour through his native Scotland’s music that smuggled in the Proclaimers and Yes Sir, I Can Boogie alongside folk songs and an athletic dance-routine, Spence was absolutely himself, absolutely in his element. Sometimes authenticity sounds like a symphony orchestra, sometimes it comes dressed in a Magic Mike-style pair of breakaway tartan trousers.
Available on BBC Sounds until 12 October and on BBC iPlayer until August 2027.
