Rebellious Prommers

The Promenaders have excelled themselves this year. I thought initially they were slightly more docile and slightly less dotty than usual, but no. Not only at the Last Night, but also at the Israel Philharmonic Prom on 1 September, they found their voice — so strongly that the BBC actually suspended the broadcast of the latter. One Prommer told me the atmosphere that night was verging on the violent.

The members of the Israel Philharmonic must have wondered what had hit them. With this concert they were concluding a lengthy worldwide tour, which had passed without a murmur. Suddenly, in the Albert Hall, every piece they played was interrupted with raucous singing, the Webern Passacaglia, for example, with the ‘Ode to Joy’. This was nothing more or less than a political statement, akin to shouting slogans at a rally, only broadcast live. Many of those standing near the objectors took against the interruptions, and for a short moment there was the danger of fisticuffs. It is true that the Philharmonic has publicly allied itself with the regime in Jerusalem — unlike the Jerusalem Quartet, for example — but, as Zubin Mehta pointed out, it gets only 8 per cent of its support from the Israeli government and so it is not exactly representing its political masters. The rest of what it needs comes from the US, a situation which rather neatly sums up the mess that is the international standing of Israel more generally; but to point this out during a Prom took something special.

The noisiness of the Promenaders has caused agonies to the BBC for many years now. The trouble started immediately after the second world war in a combination of nationalistic assertiveness, Sir Malcolm Sargent and the arrival of television.