As alluded to in my Live Journal, the Proms are now in full swing, and I’m partaking gleefully (Proms 8, 9 and 11, if you’re interested… more of “my sort of thing” to come in August). I’ve previously blogged about the wonders of the Proms, so I won’t do the whole free advertising spiel here; suffice to say that if you have any curiosity whatsoever for live orchestral music and can get to London for a not-too-late evening out and don’t mind standing for £4 or sitting a little way back/up for £6, you’d be crazy not to investigate.
I mentioned some bizarre security measures in my LJ entry… people in the queue outside (waiting for standing tickets) were told to go and take their bags for security checking and then to the cloakroom, before returning to the queue. Once inside the Albert Hall, you’d then be allowed to return to the cloakroom to collect your bag. Now, I can partly see the logic… they want to avoid the bottleneck effect of security searches as people enter the building en masse, but I can’t quite understand the sudden need for such dramatic security… especially as, on the evening in question, the programme was a sparsely attended selection of quite “difficult” music (including Messiaen’s truly breathtaking ‘Des Canyons aux Étoiles’). No Israeli orchestra, no visiting royalty, no more than 500 people in an 8000-capacity hall. Even more bizarrely, these security measures weren’t in evidence the following evening (when Stravinsky’s ‘Petrushka’ drew almost a full house). So, if you go to the Proms and get a full orifice search, do let me know…
Enough rambling, at least of the verbose kind… I’m off for three days of walking in Wiltshire.