Late Night Prom Lights Out: Prom 25

Photo: Gas lamp style street light in London at dusk.
© the author

Last night's 'late night Prom' (which wasn't that late, not ending at bedtime even for a ten year old) was strange. Not in the music, for Taverner's Ikon of Light was haunting and numinous in just the way candles gradually and slowly change a Greek Orthodox service from beginning in shadowy darkness to culminating in blazing light.

The greater light, in Prom 25, being cast by Taverner's Requiem Fragments, bursting over the Albert Hall like star shells. But more of both in another post.

The Prom sems to have been another episode in the BBC's (or Cameron's, or Britain's) celebration (sorry, 'commemoration') of World War 1. Like Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, the way this is developing is making me anxious too. As they say, "Other wars may also be available." Especially during this Proms Season.

Prom 25 ended, apparently as part of something called a 'Lights Out' memorialisation of the day the First World War started at midnight that same August day a hundred years ago. We were, I gather, supposed to switch off all our lights at home, bar one, to commemorate the Foreign Secrteary's "the lamps are going out all over Europe" remark. "They will not be lit again in our lifetime," he added,   though he was wrong. at least literally speaking, since they did come back on in many people's lifetimes, only to be put out again during them.

As it happens, between ten and eleven pm, I did only have one light on, but that was merely coincidental. I hadn't heard of the idea; and, pretty obviously, nor had most of my neighbours, whose living rooms and bedrooms seemed to be blazing away as brightly as a Greek Orthodox church full of candles.

At the Albert Hall, it seems the audience was given a candle to light each. One might have wondered if that idea meant the London Fire Brigade was standing by outside, but then, the candles might well have been no more likely to set the Albert Hall on fire than the BBC's LCD screens spread underneath the bust of Sir Henry Wood, which one season nearly did.

Lighting candles—it used to be cigarette lighters at festivals I remember, but I suppose, judging by the relative paucity of members of the Proms audience who join me for a quick interval cigarette during intervals, I suppose that wouldn't work any more—was to symbolise just what? An in memoriam of the dead, who at this point hadn't yet died? By an audience whose personal connection with the beginning of the war must be at least three generations away?

It seemed, to be honest, a bit of a stunt. And why read the 'obvious' poem by Wilfred Owen, which is really more about the end than the beginning, and could, surely, in a music festival, since it's in Britten's War Requiem, have been sung rather than spoken?

It jarred, somehow. It seemed too contrived. I didn't care for it; and I'm relieved now I couldn't (still being a bit too fragile) go to the RAH as I'd intended.

Though the music itself did not sound at all contrived, and more about that later as I catch up.

I only met Taverner briefly once, but I was told, after he joined the Orthodox Church, that after a while he was a little upset about it. He gave, I understood, the copyright of his music to the Church. But they didn't promote recordings of it, as he had, I think, expected. The Patriarch, or so I was told, met his queries about the dissemination of his compositions with "The Church has been existence for two thousand years; all in good time."

Whether that had a bearing on why he left, I don't know.

Apologies for my absence from blogging—and from the Proms, though I've recorded some I couldn't go to or listen to properly for later—for a few days. 

[Radio 3 relay]
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