Henry Wood, the Proms’ founder, was not averse to including crowd-pleasing morsels in his concerts alongside the heavy-duty Teutonic epics. These days, however, you get nothing but morsels at the Last Night of the Proms. There were 21 little items this year, ranging from The Pink Panther Theme (it is Henry Mancini’s centenary) to Welsh nursery tunes and, of course, the usual singalong of patriotic ditties.
All this was separated by far too many long gaps in the music, presumably so the TV presenters could natter away. It added up to a rather flabby and anodyne show, designed, it sometimes seemed, as much to tick the boxes of the BBC’s diversity agenda as to supply musical substance. The only bit of mild provocation came from