If you're gonna do it, do it right for me

As only a very few people in Britain have failed to notice, the Proms began this weekend. It's an event of such monumental importance that they don't even need to put it on the news -  everyone just knows it's happened. 

Owing to scheduling commitments, my reception of the First Night was intermittent.  I caught the interval feature and the first two movements of the Janacek whilst driving, and the first two items of the first half on iPlayer this morning (go on, watch it), but I have yet to witness what I have heard from rumours is a mind-blowing display of virtuosity from Benjamin Grosvenor. (Actually, I'm still more interested in Janacek than a Liszt concerto no matter who's playing it, but still).  I must laud the venerable BBC for continuing to broadcast every single concert on the radio and a now sizable selection on the telly. But if you sense a 'but' coming - that was it.  I already have a few gripes with the TV presentation, and actually it's a subject I've been meaning to get off my chest for a while now:

There's a new title sequence this season, with dancing pianos and new theme music. In fact the Proms as a whole has been given a makeover into a slightly indie-band retro-modern montage frame-of-mind.  Not to put too fine a point on it, it's not nearly as good as the old one, which had a more grown-up abstract quality and a nicely Stravinskian fanfare by Joby Talbot adapted-from-a-piece-by-Bliss. The slightly low-rent 'picture frames' of some famous conductorly and soloistic faces going by gives it the look of a rather naff 80s kids' TV show, not helped by the dancing violins and the graphics in general, which are barely above the level of a Year 8 Powerpoint presentation. The music is decent enough but not a huge improvement over Talbot et al.

Secondly, something which has started to creep into a lot of live classical music programming in the past few years: interviewing whether the moment is appropriate or not. This comes across as a a rather cheap counter-attack against the hackneyed 'classical music is elitist (and despite complaining so to the point of harassment we secretly want it to be continued to be perceived that way to make us look really 'with it' and PC)' lot.  The idea is that we in the cheap seats get to see that those brilliant musicians who have put years of study, practice and devotion into mastering some of the most difficult skills known to humanity are human after all, indeed basically the same as the rest of us. Yes, it might be interesting to know some trivia about the number of pipes on the Albert Hall organ or what household objects the percussionists have found to play in that contemporary piece.  But shoving a microphone in the face of the principal horn is never going to facilitate enough airtime for him to explain even slightly sufficiently how his instrument works and thus why sometimes splitting that top D# is unavoidable. Few questions posed seem to actually merit grabbing hold of a justifiably rather weary (but still attractive) young soprano and asking her 'how you fink it went' (as happened several times during this year's Cardiff Singer of the World) when her first language isn't English and what she really needs is a long drink and her paycheck.  She's done a stunning job with that Strauss, and the audience can hear it clearly enough in her performance.  Nothing more needs to be said or asked.  A memorable and much needed rebuke to this practice came out of the horrible dumbed-down Young Musician of the Year 2008, where, seconds after a concerto had finished, an over-exited young presenter lept at the competitor's mother and demanded 'So, how do you think he'll have felt about THAT performance then??!!' With timing bettered only by those in the very highest echelons of stand-up comedy, she replied, poker-faced 'I don't know - why don't you ask him?'  But surely the main objection to this should be coupled with the (again ever-increasing) habit of showing lots of backstage shots of formerly majestic performers now looking very normal under unflattering lights. It takes all the magic and mystery out of music performance, which is, fundamentally, a piece of theatre and so relies on illusion and monumentalising the performers. I don't suppose audiences would care to watch The Lord of the Rings and in between scenes see the guy playing the massive warrior orc take off his headpiece, chat to a cameraman and smoke a couple of Marlboro Lights, would they?, because it ruins the trick.  You can show the baritone being interviewed in his untidy flat or crammed in with everyone else on the tube, but just not in the middle of his magic show please, because it ruins everything. Isn't it enough for us just to enjoy the music?

Luckily; as I mentioned, I was driving around during the concert and caught a fair chunk of the interval feature on Radio 3. The station's not been immune to certain needless messings-around in the name of capturing a phantom 'young' audience whilst alienating your core loyal listeners, but it's still a million miles better than the shouty box.  The interval feature was on Janacek's beliefs, a perfect subject given that it is pertinent to the concert programme, short enough to fit into a twenty-minute slot yet wide enough to have plenty to say and scope for further exploration, and a quiet triumph for accessible intellectualism. Chalk one up for the radio. Also, Judith Weir's new opening fanfare did a very impressive job of being simultaneously contemporary, personal, accessible and uplifting. Chalk one up for music too.

Postscript: I've got a gig with my trio tomorrow night, which mean I will miss the live broadcast of Havergal Brian's gargantuan Gothic Symphony.  This I can live with. However, it transpires that a friend has got some returned tickets for the circle, which I would give at least one limb to get hold of were it not for prior commitment... (In a double blow, the lovely BBC have scheduled the final of The Apprentice in the middle of the Prom, too).  Such is.