Couldn’t the BBC have filled at least some of the seats? First night of the Proms reviewed

The Royal Albert Hall, as Douglas Adams never wrote, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Which is great if you want a colossal audience; less great as a venue for classical music. True, sound engineers have brought us a long way from the 19th century, when one critic (it might have been Bernard Shaw) described a Weber overture wafting around that cavernous acoustic like a feather caught in a draught. If you tune in to Radio 3 — which is how most listeners have always heard the Proms — it sounds fine. But it wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice of venue for a series of classical concerts unless, as mentioned, you’re expecting a vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big audience.

The first night of this year’s live Proms had the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo performing to an audience of one: the composer Hannah Kendall, whose new orchestral work Tuxedo: Vasco ‘de’ Gama (the title comes from Jean-Michel Basquiat) opened the concert in a flourish of jagged energy before deflating over a tinkling scrap of a spiritual. Watching it on TV had certain benefits: the camera zoomed in on the tailcoated percussionist earnestly winding a strip of punched paper through an itsy-bitsy musical box. And you were free to hurl cushions at the screen when the presenter stated that the music addresses ‘notions of identity’.

But you see the problem? When the camera spun round to show Kendall sitting alone in the hall, it did seem rather a pity that an organisation with the BBC’s resources hadn’t found a way to fill at least a few of those 5,000 empty seats. It will have its reasons, of course, possibly quite unrelated to social distancing.