Musicians are roasting at the Proms; freezing at the Bachathon

Gossip that an orchestral player fainted while performing in the Albert Hall during the recent heatwave points to a strange lacuna in the policing of concert conditions. The unions who like to stipulate how professional musicians are treated — Equity and the MU — have long made a big song and dance about minimum temperatures in the workplace. If the temperature falls below the agreed level, we are all entitled to walk out, without any further questions asked, since obviously the management is trying to save money on heating bills, to the detriment of the workers’ health.

But global warming has produced a different set of difficulties. In their ancient wisdom our shop-floor reps seem not to have worked out that the scumbags might be saving on air-conditioning units as much as on heaters. Perhaps they think that something as un-British as an air-conditioning unit would never galvanise the workforce in the same way. Yet we are asked to perform at the highest level with sweat pouring down our faces, on to our spectacles, thence to our rapidly yellowing and disintegrating copies, while the audience watch us pitilessly as if we are animals in a cage; and nobody thinks to do anything about it.

Certainly the Albert Hall is a difficult place to manage. The sheer size of it, not to mention its porous design, makes it fabulously expensive either to heat or chill. They can’t really win there. John Eliot Gardiner’s Bachathon on 5 May this year was so cold that the audience was leaving: the building was emphasising the outside temperature, which wasn’t that bad. Conversely, the Proms have been roasting, even at close to midnight, which was when the recent Tallis Scholars Prom ended.

A contributing factor may well be the lights.