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.
Blue, who was fulfilling a childhood dream by singing here, was on velvet-voiced form in two Puccini arias plus a flirty Spanish operetta number by Ruperto Chapì, delivered while lobbing roses into the audience, before returning to lead Rule, Britannia. Once again, the “azure main” she sang about might have referred to the sea of EU flags joining the union jacks and others throughout the hall.
As well as a couple of worthwhile Proms firsts – a bittersweet part song by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, beautifully delivered by the BBC Singers, and Grace Williams’s elegant Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes – there were two more premieres. Carlos Simon’s Hellfighters’ Blues paid tribute to the pioneering Black musicians of the 369th Infantry Regiment band in a joyful collision of blues and march, with a louchely jazzy starring turn for the BBCSO’s principal trumpet. And, following a sporting theme begun earlier by Charles Ives’s almost surreal orchestral depiction of the Yale-Princeton Football Game, Iain Farrington’s Extra Time was a mash-up of all the BBC’s sports theme tunes: a fluffy but inspired bit of Last Night silliness that had the BBC Symphony Chorus starting a huge Mexican wave.
