Diary – 23 July 2015

There’s nothing quite like a First Night — and last Friday we launched the Proms, the most celebrated classical music festival in the world, now in its 120th year. There’s the thrill of walking into the Royal Albert Hall for the first time; taking your seat with thousands of other music fans; the ‘heave ho’ chant from the Prommers; the quiet before the music begins. It’s a vast space, but it can also feel very intimate. So it was perfect for the opening concert with moments of quiet reflection in works by Mozart and Sibelius, as well as great walls of sound in Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. With almost 300 players and singers on stage — the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Singers, Symphony Chorus and the BBC National Chorus of Wales, all superbly directed by Sakari Oramo — it was just breathtaking. Speaking to Sakari afterwards, he was rightly exhausted, but elated.

It was an opening weekend like no other, with the Royal Albert Hall overrun with trolls, witches, and an awful lot of children — more than 600 on stage across two performances of our Ten Pieces Prom, and thousands more in the audience.