It is nearly 80 years since the Proms, which begin on Friday, moved to the Royal Albert Hall. Since then the vast auditorium has been home to the world’s biggest music festival. The hall is an iconic building, albeit rife with colourless Victoriana, but it is not the greatest place to see or hear, due to its huge scale. I have another beef, which is that the Proms should get out of London more. It is, after all, the British Broadcasting Corporation, not the London Broadcasting Corporation.
In 1930, the Proms held some concerts in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds, but it took until 2017 before they dared venture outside the capital again with three successful and much appreciated concerts in Hull, then UK City of Culture.
Last year, another Prom left London - this time to Lincoln. But in 2019, they are all being held in the capital - evenings at the Albert Hall, excellent lunchtime ones at the Cadogan Hall, plus a couple at Battersea Arts Centre and the Holy Sepulchre church. David Pickard, the Proms director, really should plan more Proms in our regional cities, such as Stoke, Sunderland or Nottingham, all pretty well starved of classical music.
A change of tune at this year’s Cadogan Proms with a special emphasis on female composers, most of whom have been overlooked. The series kicks off on 22 July with a work by the extraordinary 12th-century German abbess and philosopher, Hildegard of Bingen. Others include the Italian Antonia Bembo, who became, on moving to France, extremely close to King Louis XIV, and Barbara Strozzi, who some say had a second-string career as a high-class prostitute.
Then there is the courageous Pole Grażyna Bacewicz, who, while living in Warsaw during the second world war, composed in secret and even put on underground concerts. The last in the Cadogan series is a new work from the young Brit Freya Waley-Cohen, whose sister Tamsin is an equally talented violinist.
Just opened at the Trafalgar Studios is Peter Schaffer’s Equus. There are no big-name actors – as in the West End revival in 2007 with Daniel Radcliffe – but it’s a superb production. I saw it at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in February, and thought it deserved a run in the West End - the theatre’s first transfer for at least a decade.
Stratford (below) is a famous old venue, which for many years had not been firing on all cylinders. But with a new chair, the Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who then hired an excellent artistic director, Nadia Fall, the place is again booming, ending its 2018-19 season with a fine King Hedley II, starring Lenny Henry, and then Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, which closed last night. Unfortunately, nearly all visitors have to traipse from Stratford’s transport hub through a dreary, litter-strewn shopping centre to reach the theatre. Newham council should agree to demolish the shopping precinct, so a smaller one can be built to include space for arts and creative industry venues: a complementary cultural hub to the one planned in the nearby former Olympic Park.
