Why was Vera Lynn never booked at the BBC Proms?

Why was Vera Lynn never booked at the BBC Proms?

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norman lebrecht

June 18, 2020

She could sing Land of Hope and Glory.

After a Dutch chap persuaded her to do so.

Comments

  • Pianofortissimo says:

    Touching. Beautiful.

  • Elizabeth Owen says:

    Oh God preserve us. Enough already it’s like the Dead March, ugh.

    • Allen says:

      The lady has just died at 103.

      If you have nothing positive to contribute, why not just stay away?

    • AKP says:

      Hope we’ll not be seeing you again but I fear your trolling obsession will continue

    • Maria says:

      Yes, a tad faster and it wouldn’t have had to be milked and so many breaths taken, but thats the conductors’ fault when things were always slower in those days! But lovely to have it.

  • Greg Bottini says:

    It’s the high school graduation song!
    (Play through; repeat from twenty to fifty times, depending on the size of the class.)
    Dame Vera sings it beautifully, though.

  • David K. Nelson says:

    My father remembered that when Britain entered the war in 1939, tenor Richard Crooks sang Land of Hope and Glory on a special American radio broadcast.

    I think for certain emotional purposes this is a good tempo for the sung version, versus the March proper.

  • E says:

    This is touching. It would have been wonderful
    at the Proms.

  • Bored Muso says:

    Dame Vera should have been booked by the BBC Proms, but their elitist snobbishness which has always pervaded the Proms with regards to light music programming could be the real reason she wasn’t.
    She would have held her own against all those classical opera singers who appear on the last night trying to embarrass us (and them) in their dreadful attempts to sing light music well.

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