The first three nights of the 2010 BBC Proms, announced today, consist of
– Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand, conducted by Jiri Belohlavek;
– Bryn Terfel singing Hans Sachs in a Welsh concert staging of Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nuremberg;
– and Placido Domingo as Simon Boccanegra in a production transferred from the Royal Opera, Covent Garden.
The cost of a weekend ticket for these three shows – if you’re quick and lucky enough to land one – is as little as £12.50 ($19). Nowhere on earth can prime performance be heard for such a minimal outlay. Booking opens on May 4, right here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2010/booking/
If you don’t manage to score these top tickets, here are the ten Lebrecht unmissables from this year’s 76 events, priced from £5 upwards:
Prom 19 31 July Sondheim at 80, with Terfel, Maria Friedman, Simon Russell Beale
Prom 26 5 Aug Gergiev conducts Mahler 4, followed by Mahler 5
Prom 34 10 Aug Vienna Night: Schreker, Korngold, Mahler 7; cond Metzmacher
Bach Day 14 Aug Complete Brandenburg concertos, cond J E Gardiner
Prom 42 17 Aug Pärt, Britten, Huw Watkins, Shostakovich, cond. Ed Gardner
Prom 46 20 Aug Mosolov, Pärt, Ravel, Scriabin, cond. Salonen
Prom 47 20 Aug Cage, Cardew, Skempton, Feldman, cond. Volkov
Prom 52 24 Aug Sydney Symphony Orchestra with Grimaud and Ashkenazy
Prom 61 31 Aug Glyndebourne’s Hansel and Gretel with Alice Coote and Lydia Teuscher
Prom 66 4 Sep Rattle and Berlin Phil in Strauss 4 Last Songs (Mattila), Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.
I was thrilled to learn this morning that Katie Derham is joining the BBC to present the Proms on television and radio. It is a significant step in Mark Thompson’s strategic review to reverse the insistent dumbing down of culture that has raged in recent years.
The Proms has been a particular target of the dumb clucks who run the main TV channel. First, they imposed as presenter the grinning gardener, Alan Titchmarsh, a cuddly fellow who endeared himself to the nation’s middle-aged female spread but who knew and felt so little about music that a speaking autocue would have injected more passion into his links.
After an upsurge of public discontent, and a number of attacks in my column (starting here), Titch was replaced by a so-called ‘professional presenter’, a sometime lawyer named Clive Anderson who stumbled over the simplest of names and missed the obvious jokes.
Now, in Katie Derham, they have found someone who is both presentable and knowledgeable about music, who can express her engagement with the music without sounding either patronising or incompetent. Katie, 39, who lives down the road from me, will be giving up her role as an ITN newscaster and probably also as a Classic FM sleepytime DJ.
She joins the BBC in a week when one of its ratings-hot presenters, Adrian Chiles, swooned off in a huff to ITV. In the realms of television schedulings, her recruitment will be regarded as an industrial counter-coup. In the more important business of ensuring that music is mediated to a mass public, Katie Derham is a long-overdue stride in the right direction.
Proms controller Roger Wright will announce the full programme later today and I’ll present a summary here.
