Record first-day sales for BBC Proms
mainThe BBC has announced that 118,000 tickets were sold on the first day of booking, up 9 percent on last year.
Some 31,000 tickets were vended online in the first hour of Saturday box-office.
Top draws were Beethoven’s 9th symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelsons (19 July), Bernstein – Stage and Screen with the John Wilson Orchestra and Maida Vale Singers (5 September), Yo-Yo Ma’s Late Night performance of Bach’s complete cello suites (5 September), a programme including Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.2 performed by Nikolai Lugansky and the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra with Yuri Temirkanov (7 September), and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with Sir Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic (11 September).
What, the all-Prokofiev concertos concert didn’t sell out? I’m shocked.
So the top sellers weren’t the supposedly ‘popular’ things like the Ibiza night, the Asian Network night and Jarvis Cocker?
Good – that’s one in the eye for the philistine BBC bigwigs and their attempt to destroy the festival.
I doubt the “bigwigs” will bat an eyelid — they will continue to aggressively sell their “innovations” through their broadcasting apparatus (brace yourselves for “the first ever TV broadcast…” and “another acclaimed collaboration between Radio 3 and…”; then, a few months after the Last Night, they will be rebranded as “highlights” with prime slots for re-broadcast in the coming winter), and will care only for being able to put them down on paper as achievements by some objective criterion that has nothing to do with artistic merit. Indeed, it is a rather similar way of doing business to the “style-over-substance” approach to how composition commissions are determined and funded these days, as outlined by Croft’s article /Composition is not Research/ in Tempo №272, pp. 6–11 (see in particular his hilarious hypothetical example involving ice-cap data).
My ‘Andris Nelson’ groupie daughter, Karen, apparently logged-on at 9.00am sharp and found herself at four thousand, three hundred and something in the queue, so she was not THAT surprised all tix for Nelsons’ Beethoven 9 had long since gone, BUT she did manage a ‘Gerontius’ and a Mahler 6 (with her man at the helm) so not a complete waste of time, she opines.
Get rid of those silly nincompoops who stand like prissy little poodles on heat who dominate the centre ground and I’d consider going again myself in spite of the stifling heat and poor acoustics, but until then……
She was lucky to get on at 9.00 I tried and eventually got on at 9.40 number 6,915 and got my Prokofiev ticket by 10.40 better than queuing!