If programming the Proms as a whole is a balancing act, the Last Night has its own extra challenges, not all of them connected to culture wars. Is it a live event that happens to be televised, or a TV broadcast with a live audience? This year, long pauses between short pieces meant that, for the first hour or so, there was almost as much waiting as music – making time for pre-recorded interviews on the TV broadcast but stretching patience in the hall, despite the relishable quality of the BBCSO’s playing and the bonhomie radiated by its conductor Sakari Oramo. Plus the piano was rolled on near the end of the first half and off during the second, which, for all the efficiency of the Proms stage staff, is no Formula 1 pitstop.
Still, that piano, or the person playing it, provided several of the evening’s highlights. As well as joining the US soprano Angel Blue in his own arrangement of two Spirituals, Stephen Hough was a nuanced soloist in Saint-Saëns’s ‘Egyptian’ Concerto – the second movement only, sadly – creating something magical with the composer’s other-worldly overtone effects. This would have been a sober end to the first half had he not followed it as an encore with his own dazzlingly playful fantasia on Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
