Last Night of the Proms 2021, review: a return to a balance of fun and games with misty-eyed celebration
In a normal year the Last Night of the Proms is that giddy moment when you throw caution and dignity to the winds, mutter “oh, sod it” at the thought of the disapproving sidelong glances you might get, and join the other 5,000 people in the Albert Hall in a lusty singalong of Rule Britannia, Jerusalem and Auld Lang Syne.
But this year? After eighteen months of living through a pandemic, when “throwing caution to the winds” was definitely something not to be admired, especially if it involved taking off your mask and singing? For months after the pandemic began singing was actually a punishable offence. That’s one reason the rumour that began to circulate a few days ago that singing “Rule Britannia” and “Jerusalem” might be banned at this year’s Last Night seemed vaguely plausible. Either that or it was a last-minute flare-up of last year’s mini-culture war, when some activists declared that singing patriotic songs at the Last Night was a shameful act of colonialist oppression and should be banned.
All this made me think this year’s Last Night might be a somewhat muted affair. I needn’t have worried. As I approached the Albert Hall I could see the chaps in silly outfits were out in force; I saw one in a splendid Welsh dragon waistcoat having a tipple with another in an equally splendid St George’s Cross waistcoat. The sellers of flags of every nation were doing a roaring trade. The group of pro-EU demonstrators in their snazzy blue hats with their signs saying “Thank EU for the music” were waving their starred flags defiantly. Everything was back to normal.
Normal at the Last Night means balancing fun and games and misty-eyed celebration of Proms traditions with musical seriousness and—increasingly—showing that the Proms is aware of contemporary issues. The evening had its nod to BLM, in the shape of a joyous African dance from the Symphony no 1 by Florence Price, an African-American composer whose moment has finally come. The very first piece, a brand-new piece called Mother from Iranian/American composer Gity Razaz was an acknowledgement of the pressing issue of climate change. It set out to evoke the Mother Earth that sustains us and yet suffers so many blows. The piece was strikingly inventive, but tried to pack too much mingled joy and strife into its five minute span.
Honours were also paid to a number of anniversary composers. Malcolm Arnold and Ruth Gipps, both born in 1921 were very neatly saluted with the same piece, Malcolm Arnold’s Variations on a theme by Ruth Gipps, which amusingly juxtaposed Gipps’s pastoral romanticism with Arnold’s nose-thumbing, ear-bending dissonance. Most handsomely saluted was Astor Piazzolla, the inventor of ‘new tango’.
Which brings me to one of the evening’s two star guests, the Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova, on hand to play two tributes to Piazzolla, as well as a deliciously sentimental song by Argentinian songster Aníbal Troilo. Sidorova used the emphatically sharp, muscular sound of her instrument to good effect to summon up the unappeasable longing in Piazzolla’s music, and its air of nocturnal mystery. Anyone doubting that the accordion was a fit instrument to be given star billing at the Last Night of the Proms would have been persuaded otherwise by Sidorova’s astonishing performance.
However she didn’t in any way cast the other star guest into the shade. Australian operatic tenor Stuart Skelton may have had some difficulties with his top notes in the Prize Song from Wagner’s Mastersingers, but his rendition of Im Treibhaus from Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder was spellbinding in its hushed, muted intensity. Just as moving in a different way was Percy Grainger’s arrangement of the folk-song Brigg Fair, in which Skelton’s nostalgically soft voice was lovingly cushioned by the BBC Singers. Soon the balloons would start to pop and the rousing singalongs would get under way; but this was the Last Night’s best moment.
Watch and listen to the Last Night until 11 October via the BBC iPlayer.
