High season ... The Proms. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Guilt and its more persistent counterpart, regret, are my constant companions throughout every Proms season: they attend every concert I fail to. Guilt nags at me every time I am forced to cry off a concert due to my overwhelming love for sitting down. Regret kicks in every time said concert turns out, in retrospect, to have been a bit of an "event".
You see, a few über-Prommers aside, most people's threshold for heat and leg cramps extends no further than a couple of evenings a week. But the Proms regime is a brutal one, with events packed so closely together that your poor feet sometimes have less than an hour in which to prepare themselves for the next podalic onslaught.
Such was the case last week. Between them, Tuesday and Wednesday saw the first world premiere of the season; the first performance in modern times of a hugely significant vocal work; and an 80th birthday bash for venerated conductor Kurt Masur, including a rare entente cordiale between the London Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de France.
Alas, although my mind was perfectly willing to endure six hours of music in two days, my flesh was a little less certain. I was forced to pick and choose, and, I'm sorry to say, I think I might have chosen wrong.
For no better reason than that Charles Ives's astonishing Fourth Symphony was also on the programme, I went along to the world premiere. It was of a piece by Sam Hayden called Substratum, and, although it came to us in a severely truncated form - the BBC Symphony Orchestra didn't have time to finish rehearsing it - it more than outstayed its welcome, consisting as it did of an amorphous collage of post-war cliches and warmed-up Birtwistlean gestures.
In retrospect, I wish I'd stuck it out for the Late Night Prom the same evening, which featured Alessandro Striggio's 40-part Mass, apparently being performed for the first time in half a millennium. I am told a fairly sizeable crowd turned out to witness this one, and well they might have: Martin Kettle called it "not just the choral event of the year but possibly of the decade." Let's just hope it's not another 500 years before its next airing, or I really will be kicking myself.
This week's unmissable events: Sir Roger Norrington conducts an all-star performance of Haydn's The Seasons today; Vladimir Jurowski brings his Glyndebourne production of Verdi's Macbeth to the Royal Albert Hall tomorrow; and shiny instruments of all shapes and sizes take over the Hall on Saturday for an extravagant Brass Day.
