As the Proms reminds us every year, music is a wonderful pacifier. While London was convulsed with Union flag wavers angrily facing off Free Palestine banners, the Royal Albert Hall was surrounded by smiling Prommers of a certain age in Pac-a-macs waving EU flags. Once inside, it was the usual sea of Union flags alongside flags of all nations.
The sight set us up nicely for the programme, which was friendly and light as puff pastry. It wasn’t always thus. The Last Night used to kick off with a proper meat-and-two-veg symphony, with a side mung bean salad of modernism, before treble helpings of cherry trifle waltzes, comic “novelties” and rousing patriotic sing-alongs.
These days it’s cherry trifle from the word go. The BBC Symphony Orchestra under conductor Elim Chan kicked off the evening with a thrilling burst of Russian-style diabolism with Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain. Then came star trumpeter Alison Balsom, marking her farewell to professional music-making with a performance of the trumpet concerto by a little-known pupil of Mozart, Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
The outer movements had a superb, muscular precision, while the central slow movement had a lovely Mozartian lyricism. It was altogether wonderful, and made one regret that Balsom is leaving the stage so young (though she did pop back later, to play some sassy trumpet riffs with players from the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue and Riffs).
After the concerto came a parade of occasional pieces, arias, and what Proms founder Sir Henry Wood would have called “novelties”. Among the highlights was soprano Louise Alder, who made that insufferably pert and sugary Jewel Song from Charles Gounod’s Faust seem charming, and she was also winning in a medley of songs from My Fair Lady, even though the songs were pitched too low for her. Comedian Bill Bailey showed an unsuspected rhythmic virtuosity, typing away furiously in Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter.
Among the new pieces, Lucy Walker’s tiny jewel of a choral number Today was radiantly innocent, as was Rachel Portman’s The Gathering Tree, in a Scottish folky sort of way. The only disappointment was Fireworks, a perfect specimen of the “American corporate triumphalism” school of orchestral showpiece that just happened to be composed by a Frenchwoman, Camille Pépin.
All this was carried off by the BBC Singers, Symphony Orchestra and Singers with great panache under the superbly alert, smiling control of Chan, who reminded us in her speech how lucky we are in Britain to enjoy complete freedom in cultural matters. That felt especially meaningful coming from someone who was raised in Hong Kong.
But the evening’s real highlight was the orchestral arrangement of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. As the Orchestra, Singers and guest solo singer belted out those famous lines “easy come, easy go, little high, little low”, on came two original members of Queen to lend a helping hand – Sir Brian May on guitar and Roger Taylor on tam-tam. If the Proms had somehow magicked up the shade of Henry Wood himself the audience couldn’t have been more ecstatic.
Listen to and watch the Last Night on BBC Sounds and BBC iPlayer.