Letter from London: Special bonds at the Proms

By JOE HARROP

The BBC Proms season has just ended. Six weeks of orchestras, choirs, classical music's superstars and blossoming talents. Add to this cheap tickets - a shilling at the first Proms season in 1895, £4 ($13.40) now - the queues (sometimes for hours), a standing-only arena instead of stalls (classical music's version of the mosh pit) and the hollowed-out mountain that is the Royal Albert Hall, and you have one of the greatest music festivals in the world.

The Proms now incorporate chamber music and poetry at venues outside the Albert Hall alongside the more conventional extra-musical offerings such as pre-concert lectures and interviews. Nearby Hyde Park can turn a matinee concert into a picnic with a difference, providing the weather is suitable.

One Prom featured maestro Valery Gergiev and the Kirov orchestra performing Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Like most music students, I had my £4 ready to buy a standing ticket. You see all types of people queueing for tickets. I was joined by two of Russia's prominent avant-garde composers, Dmitry Smirnov and Elena Firsova. Well-known in the London contemporary music scene, they're happy with the cheap tickets, preferring to stand.

The Proms season often presents marathon performances. By the end of the concert I was to attend, the orchestra and conductor would have spent more than six hours on stage in a single day.

The concert was packed. Leader Yuri Zagorodnyuk looked perturbed at the traditional Proms applause when he struck A on the piano to tune the orchestra. It was the first and last moment of uncertainty in a rollicking rendition of Prokofiev's third piano concerto. Pianist Alexander Toradze carved into his solo lines, playing most of the concerto half-standing.

Unfortunately the BBC cameramen caused a disturbance in quieter sections of the concerto, winding their large equipment back and forth, to the irritation of those who had arrived early to be at the front.

Shostakovich's monstrous fourth symphony made up the concert's second half. Withdrawn by the composer after Stalin's infamous article in Pravda on Soviet music, the symphony is a marathon for player and listener. In the immense first movement, long fugal passages hammer the audience again and again. Gergiev and the Kirov strings displayed strong ensemble and an intense sound in these sections. Russian strings have a unique collective timbre. As the composer was writing for just one generation of players before those on stage, one could argue this was the sound he envisaged when writing the fourth symphony.

Shostakovich's score puts considerable hurdles before the orchestra, with everything from the tuba to the castanets having to play solos and work within difficult rhythmic patterns. Through screeching piccolos and thundering double timpani, Gergiev kept a steady hand on the tiller. A duet between snare drum and castanets was played at an insect-like dynamic. A lesser conductor would have lost control but the Russian maestro kept thrashing to a minimum, holding the orchestra and audience energy for the severe peaks of this exhausting symphony.

After the trumpets had blown their guts out, and the celeste picked out its last note over infinitely quiet strings, the entire hall came to a standstill. Even the cameramen were motionless. A silence of 10 seconds or so held out before the audience erupted into applause. Gergiev was called back on stage a deserved five times, finally holding up the score, so giving Shostakovich his share of the acclaim.

Standing among fellow Promenaders one senses a special energy. It's a kind of closeness, like a ringside seat. You can almost smell the players - not that you'd want to after six hours on stage. The effort required to stay on your feet for an entire concert reflects the effort of the performers. Musicians also speak of this relationship in Proms concerts.

I'm sure it is this energy that has turned "Mr Robert Newman's Promenade Concerts" of 1895 into what the BBC Proms are today.