Affectionate and unthreatening, just like usual: Last Night of the Proms reviewed

The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if they’d given it a moment’s thought. A sprinkling of popular classics, a pair of unthreatening premières, the familiar landmarks tastefully and affectionately done, and some show tunes and arias, sung by the soprano Golda Schultz with a generosity and warmth that couldn’t have been more potent if she really had been singing to a packed and cheering Royal Albert Hall, rather than TV cameras and emptiness. It was recognisably a Last Night of the Proms: celebratory in that slipper-wearing BBC way, without ignoring the unavoidable truth that you can’t have audience participation without an audience.

And after all that fuss, too. Social media gives all arguments a sharper, meaner edge, but the annual stramash over the Last Night is a fixture dating back at least a quarter of a century to 1995, when John Drummond decided to wind up the normies by commissioning Harrison Birtwistle’s Panic. You know the script: in late August, someone at the Corporation drops a juicy scrap of Daily Mail bait, carefully hedged with plausible deniability. The resulting faux-outrage ricochets tinnily around the media until the concert itself feels like an anti-climax — which might, of course, be the point. It’s a silly season page-filler, probably best experienced at this stage as a Proms tradition in its own right. If you’re at all inclined to take it seriously, you probably need to lie down somewhere dark with a wet flannel on your head, and think hard about your life choices.

Still, it’d be healthy to see it quietly de-escalated; if only for the sake of the blameless musicians — such as this year’s conductor Dalia Stasevska — who by all accounts found themselves implicated in a row whose protagonists on left and right showed no great interest in the rest of the curtailed Proms season.