Venezuela Rocks The Proms
There are always several Proms one wants to attend in person — next Monday’s Evening with Michael Ball is quite near the top of my list — but one I simply couldn’t miss was last night’s Albert Hall debut of the much lauded Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.
The kids from the slums and barrios under the dynamic leadership of 26 year-old conductor Gustavo Dudamel (he started in the band when he was eleven) played Shostakovich’s magnificent Tenth as if they knew the whole wicked truth about the world and then launched into Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic dances from West Side Story with a brio that was unbelievable. Was it a political decision, I wonder, to skip the “I Want To Be In America” section?
Then, after some raucous Venezuelan tango music, they all donned patriotic shell-suit jackets and became propagandist symbols of President Chavez’s controversial regime: chavs for Chavez, in fact.
This was my annual night out in Proms supremo Nicholas Kenyon’s box, a treat that will probably terminate next year when Nick’s moved on to the Barbican.
He always has a good set of guests, and pre-show and interval mingling is fraught with chatty pleasures. Last night’s gang included David Hare with his wife Nicole Fahri, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, columnist Martin Kettle, broadcaster Sue McGregor and music-loving Tory MP Edward Garnier.
After the band had done three encores, and their own rival version of the Mexican wave, twirling their trumpets, spinning their basse and throwing their shell suits into the audience, we dragged ourselves, limp with pleasure and exhaustion, onto the rainy streets outside. I’ve had some wild nights at the Proms, but never experienced anything quite like this.
I didn’t pick up any juicy info from Sir David, but Garnier confided that Gordon Brown is almost certain not to call an election in October and will wait for next May; by which time, he reckons, interest rates and pensions will have spread from an Achilles heel to a major muscular liability for the government…
Nick Kenyon’s a neighbour of mine, but we go back a very long way, to the arts pages of the Financial Times in the 1980s and The Observer in the 1990s. His wife Ghislaine asked us all to sign a farewell to the Proms book and I struggled for something appropriate to say. These things are always so full of blandness and banalities. Finally I managed: “Ou sont les neiges d’Anton Chekhov?” I know, but I was still shaking with the Shostakovich.
