The Sound of Promundrums

Music The excellent Proms issue of BBC Music Magazine was published today which means there’s just a week until the festival. I’m very excited but also strangely reticent. It would be very easy for me to decide to listen to everything again, but to some extent that seems like it would betray last year’s personal achievement, make it less special somehow. Also, I just don’t want to be in the position of listening to some random noise, sorry avant-guard, at half eleven at night, or a whole day’s worth of some opera I’ve only a tangential interest in. Listen to all of the music I have in the intervening months has certainly helped to develop my tastes and they’re predictably mainstream.

Still, there’s a folk day and Bach day and Carolin Widmann playing Stravinsky, and plenty of Mozart. Reading the Proms line-up is a different experience this year since I know many of the performer names and have a broad notion of the music to expect in each concert and understand why certain composers have been gathered together. I bought the programme on the publication date but haven’t looked at it until now, not wanting to spoil the surprises. On every page there’s something amazing, Requiems and Passions, Rhapsodies and Masses. New director Roger Wright has clearly wanted his first programme to be as inclusive as possible and every major composer seems to be represented.

Even Murray Gold. A Doctor Who prom! I’ve known about this for months of course, and that there would be a special episode in the middle. It’s an exciting opportunity for Gold though to have his music heard in one of the centres for classical music and to my ears certainly deserves it. Say what you like about the sound mix used on the episodes, but the past four years of the programme have produced some of the most memorable television spot music ever, as good as many film composers (if not better in some cases). No word as to which themes will appear in those forty minutes before the apt choice (if you know the series) of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man though surely Martha’s theme should get a look in given Freema Agyeman’s presenting the shebang…

Perhaps that’s why Charles Hazlewood (pictured) has decided to go for the David Tennant look this season. Good to see one of my criticisms of last year’s coverage has been heeded – the knowledgeable BBC Four presenters are being used on the BBC Two broadcasts this time instead of otherwise unseen interlopers from Classic FM with Suzy Klein and Hazlewood heading up the shows on the second best channel (though he’s being bumped for Clive Anderson(!) for the last night). No sign of the magical Angellica Bell whose random presenting style and pronunciation of the Promundrum word always livened up an interval last year, though Radio 3’s Sara Mohr-Pietsch will be appearing on screen for the first time. On the basis of all that, it seems to me the best option is to promise myself all of the televised Proms and as much else as I can fit in without becoming too obsessive.