Last Night of the Proms 2023

BBC Singers

Coronation Sanctus was commissioned for the coronation of King Charles III at Westminster Abbey on 6 May. Originally written for double choir and organ, the version with orchestra that we hear tonight was commissioned by the Choral Arts Society of Washington DC at the instigation of Marin Alsop, who has included it in tonight’s Prom. 

For the original version, I was delighted to be given a very detailed brief by Westminster Abbey Organist and Master of the Choristers Andrew Nethsingha – a once-in-a-lifetime commission. He wanted this part of the service to be festive and glittering, in contrast to the more meditative Mass movements that appeared either side of it. 

The piece starts a little mysteriously, with an atmosphere of awe and wonderment as Isaiah describes his vision of heaven. The music quickly builds and finishes ecstatically, with organ fanfares that, in the orchestral version, become more numerous with their flamboyantly colourful harmonies.

Coronation Sanctus was first performed, at the coronation, by the choirs of Westminster Abbey and His Majesty’s Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, with girl choristers from Truro Cathedral Choir and Methodist College, Belfast, an octet from the Monteverdi Choir and organist Peter Holder. 

I am hugely honoured and deeply grateful to His Majesty King Charles III for the original commission, and to Andrew Nethsingha and Canon Mark Birch for their invaluable guidance during the creative process.

^{Programme note © Roxanna Panufnik
Coronation Sanctus was commissioned on behalf of The King by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster for the Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla. This version for choir and orchestra was commissioned by The Choral Arts Society of Washington DC, made possible by Caryn Fraim and Tad Czyzewski.}

Commissioned for last year’s Last Night of the Proms, which was abandoned following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, 1922 celebrates a moment of innovation. In that year the first BBC broadcast was sent. Since that point, this technology has become invaluable to us. We now have access to such riches of experience, information, news, storytelling, music – and much more. And it is through the universality of technology and social media that, on an individual level, we share our thoughts and experiences. We are part of an all-encompassing broadcasting culture.

1922 takes a bird’s-eye view of the BBC’s first 100 years; it races forwards with the energy and innovation we have borne witness to. It is exuberant and, at heart, it’s a celebration. 

••• 

The piece begins with that initial moment of creation – a fizz of static – and then music pours out, like water from a burst dam: a cloud of sounds that race away at an incredible speed.

1922 is dedicated to my grandmother, who passed away while I was writing the final few bars. At 99 years of age, she almost reached her own centenary.

^{Programme note © James B. Wilson}

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus

In February 1952 Walton was working on his opera Troilus and Cressida, at his home on the Italian island of Ischia, when the news reached him of the death of King George VI, at whose coronation in 1937 Walton’s orchestral march Crown Imperial had been premiered (although originally commissioned by the BBC for the crowning of Edward VIII, before his abdication).

As the nation’s sadness at the King’s death began to be overlaid by thoughts of the forthcoming coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Walton was keen to demonstrate once again his mastery of the art of composing for state occasions. He became even keener when he discovered that Benjamin Britten, the object of his (usually) friendly rivalry, was composing an opera – Gloriana, on the life of Queen Elizabeth I – for the coronation festivities.

In September 1952, during one of his regular visits to England, Walton met Sir William McKie, the organist of Westminster Abbey and Director of Music for the coronation service planned for 2 June 1953. Walton agreed to compose a new coronation march (Orb and Sceptre) and also a Coronation Te Deum. Always the thorough professional, he asked for precise details of the number and layout of the choir, orchestra and Kneller Hall Trumpeters, and looked over the Abbey himself to keep in his mind’s eye just where all these performers would be positioned. With the necessary royal and ecclesiastical approval secured, composition could then begin.

Besides Walton’s inside knowledge of choral singing (he had been a chorister at Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral), the Coronation Te Deum demonstrates its composer’s orchestral brilliance and his flair for ceremonial style. The forces involved are suitably large: two mixed choruses, two semi-choruses, organ, orchestra and optional military brass. Meanwhile Walton also maximised the opportunities for quiet contrast suggested by the text.

•••

The Coronation Te Deum begins with shouts of praise from the choir, complete with joyful orchestral injections and answering phrases on the organ. At ‘To thee Cherubim and Seraphim’, bold, swinging modulations lead to the semi-choruses’ quieter ‘Holy, holy’, then a rousing climax at ‘the Majesty of thy Glory’, and gentler material for ‘The glorious company of the Apostles’, with strings and harp adding serene commentary.

Brass fanfares introduce ‘Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ’ and a more reflective central section, before the opening music returns for ‘O Lord, save thy people’. Then, at the final statement of ‘Let me never be confounded’, the lavish splendour suddenly falls away to leave a trumpet call hinting at the Day of Judgement. The quiet and memorable ending reminds us that, even on such a rightly happy occasion, a moment of reflection also has its place.

^{Programme note © Malcolm Hayes
Malcolm Hayes is a composer, writer, broadcaster and music journalist. He contributes regularly to BBC Music Magazine and edited The Selected Letters of William Walton. His BBC-commissioned Violin Concerto was performed at the Proms in 2016.}

Lise Davidsensoprano

‘Dich, teure Halle’ gives us our first glimpse of Elisabeth, the heroine of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. First staged in Dresden in 1845, Tannhäuser draws on medieval Germanic legends to tell the story of a minstrel-knight who has been led astray by Venus, the goddess of love, but, having tired of a life of only pleasure, has torn himself away from her realm. He returns to the Wartburg Castle and to his former love, Elisabeth, who, it transpires, will award the prize in a song competition. Tannhäuser, still distracted by memories of Venus, sings of lust and passion, and in doing so offends the court so gravely that he is banished and ordered to make a pilgrimage to Rome. In the end, the Pope cannot save his soul, but the love of Elisabeth can. Tannhäuser thus follows one of Wagner’s favourite themes: that of female self-sacrifice leading to male (or indeed universal) redemption. 

The aria ‘Dich, teure Halle’ starts as the curtain rises on Act 2. Following an orchestral introduction that captures her agitated exuberance, Elisabeth stands in the Wartburg’s Hall of Song for the first time since Tannhäuser left, and the memory of her sadness during his absence is eclipsed by music expressing her joy and confidence in his return. 

^{Programme note © Erica Jeal
Erica Jeal is a music critic for The Guardian and Deputy Editor of Opera magazine.}

1 Easter Hymn
2 Intermezzo

Lise Davidsen soprano
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus

With the first performance of Cavalleria rusticana (‘Rustic Chivalry’) at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 17 May 1890, a new epoch began in Italian opera. The work’s 26-year-old composer, Pietro Mascagni, had been a fellow student of Puccini at the Milan Conservatory but had left without completing his course, joining an operetta company instead as double-bass player and conductor. 

Stranded by the company after the manager disappeared with the takings, he was slowly building a career as a local musician in Cerignola in Apulia when, in 1889, he decided to enter a competition for new one-act operas instigated by the publisher Edoardo Sonzogno. His entry, Cavalleria rusticana, won and went on to establish itself as a permanent addition to the operatic repertoire. 

It was among the first of a new genre known as verismo, meaning ‘realism’, and following its overwhelming success at its premiere, and then both nationally and internationally, it strongly influenced other Italian composers, as well as many further afield. 

Mascagni’s opera was based on a play by the Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga derived from his own short story of the same title. Inspired by the French novelist Zola, Verga’s own literary vocation focused on documenting the lives of the poor in communities familiar to him in his native area. 

Following suit, Mascagni’s work deliberately moved away from the concerns of regal or noble characters to present everyday tragedies concerning the inhabitants of Italian rural or urban working-class communities. 

Set in a small Sicilian village, Cavalleria rusticana tells how Santuzza, seduced and abandoned by her former lover Turiddu (and consequently excommunicated), takes revenge on him by informing Alfio – husband of Turiddu’s current lover, Lola – of what is going on under his very nose. 

••• 

The Easter Hymn is sung as the villagers celebrate Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. Offstage are heard the voices of the church choir, while onstage local people, including Santuzza, raise their voices in a hymn of praise. 

Not long after this inspiring piece Santuzza, goaded beyond endurance by Turiddu’s indifference, informs Alfio of his wife’s affair. Played with the curtain up and to an empty stage, the Intermezzo follows. Midway in the action, it seems to distance itself from the violent passions of the drama it intersects.

^{Programme note © George Hall
George Hall writes widely on classical music and opera for such publications as The Stage, Opera, Opera Now and BBC Music Magazine. He also co-edited The Proms in Pictures (BBC Books, 1995) with Matías Tarnopolsky.}

Lise Davidsensoprano
Andrew Rupp baritone

Giuseppe Verdi’s search for striking librettos drew him repeatedly to Shakespeare – ‘one of my favourite poets,’ he once claimed. ‘I have had him in my hands since my earliest childhood and I read and re-read him continually.’

Three of his finest operas are directly derived from Shakespeare: Macbeth (1847, revised 1865), Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). Although he also had a libretto for an operatic King Lear drawn up, Verdi did not set it.

Premiered at the Teatro della Pergola, Florence, in 1847, Macbeth was based on a play the composer admired inordinately. ‘The tragedy is one of the greatest human creations!,’ he wrote to his librettist, Francesco Piave. ‘If we can’t do something great with it, let us at least try to do something out of the ordinary.’

In this distillation of Shakespeare’s original, Lady Macbeth receives and reads a letter from her husband informing her of the strange prophecies made to him by the witches. Fearing her husband’s lack of resolve in following the ruthless path to power that lies ahead, she bids him come so that she can give him sufficient courage to become King of Scotland. 

Then, learning that the present King – Duncan – will arrive shortly to spend a night at the Macbeths’ castle, she calls on the agents of Hell to support her and her husband in the assassination she plans. 

^{Programme note © George Hall}

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

Sheku Kanneh-Mason cello
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus

Feminist superheroes are the inspiration behind Higher. Further. Faster. Together. This is the main theme for the film The Marvels, due for release in November, for which I have written the music. In the film, being a powerful superhero is not a solo act but part of a collaboration. In my experience, teamwork is what always gets the hardest jobs done, from taking down a villain, to fighting for equality and opportunity. 

On the soundtrack, Higher. Further. Faster. Together. opens with solo viola, a sound that is mournful but powerful, but for tonight, I was thrilled to arrange the part for Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who will be taking us to a higher, other-worldly register! Metallic instruments then present a broken theme that never quite lands. The choir begins to chant a newly constructed language based on the words ‘Athena’ (Goddess of wisdom and war), ‘Artemis’ (Goddess of wild animals, the hunt and vegetation) and ‘Persephone’ (Queen of the Underworld). 

The strings then come in with a very long, rhythmically driven build-up. Our superheroes are summoning their powers and their energy, almost willing heroism to emerge. Finally, the main theme bursts through with the French horns playing the epic sound of empowerment and dynamic collaboration. We march towards an ending that appears not quite complete: bright, shiny, optimistic, but not yet resolved, because there is still so much more work to be done …

^{Programme note © Laura Karpman}

Sheku Kanneh-Masoncello

Composed originally for solo piano, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s 24 Negro Melodies, Op. 59 (1905), draw inspiration from African, Caribbean and African American folk songs. This collection was published at a time when Jim Crow segregation was in full swing and blackface minstrelsy was one of the dominant forms of mainstream entertainment, not only in the US but also in Europe. Defiantly, Coleridge-Taylor took the word ‘Negro’ and restored pride and power with a body of works that celebrated the ingenuity of diverse folk cultures across the African continent and diaspora. 

‘Deep River’ (No. 10 in the set) is based on a spiritual and is one of the collection’s most enduring works. Coleridge-Taylor’s score includes an excerpt from the lyrics: ‘Deep River, my home is over Jordan, / Deep River, Lord I want to cross over into campground.’ Rippling gestures on E major chords open the music, as if evoking water. The spiritual melody then enters, stoic and unhurried. There are two contrasting sections: a short and pensive episode that begins in C sharp minor, and an extended jubilant passage, signalled by a shift to E minor. The solo and chamber renderings of ‘Deep River’ by the Kanneh-Masons have been a hit with modern audiences, and now the work finds new expression in this version for solo cello, harp and strings.

^{Programme note © Samantha Ege
Samantha Ege is a musicologist and concert pianist, as well as a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She is the author of the forthcoming South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene. She has recorded several albums, featuring piano music by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Her next album highlights piano concertos by women who composed in the 19th and 20th centuries.}

Lise Davidsen soprano
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus

From the distant Carpathian Mountains, a cry from the heart. The singer is the beautiful Sylva Varescu, known to her fans as the Gypsy Princess, and she’s a supreme performer of the famous Hungarian folk dance – first slow and sultry, then fast and furious – known as the csárdás. Sylva is the star of Budapest’s Orpheum cabaret, a haunt of bohemians and off-duty princes. And we’re hearing the flamboyant opening number of an operetta from 1915 by Emmerich Kálmán: a world in which illusion is stronger than reality (and definitely more fun), and social norms are up for grabs – until, of course, love finally conquers all. 

Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin (‘The Gypsy Princess’) took Vienna by storm during the First World War, then crossed the Atlantic to Broadway too, where its translator, P. G. Wodehouse, declared that ‘the Kálmán score was not only the best that gifted Hungarian ever wrote, but about the best anybody ever wrote’. Sylva’s song – moving from the slow (lassú) opening to the headlong friss of a traditional Hungarian csárdás – tells us exactly where we are, but also sets the terms of the drama to come. ‘When a Magyar girl falls in love with you, don’t play games.’ All that folkloric passion is just a performance … isn’t it? The words might tease, but the music never lies.

^{Programme note © Richard Bratby
Richard Bratby writes on music and culture for The Spectator, Gramophone, Bachtrack and the Birmingham Post and is a passionate operetta enthusiast. His book Refiner’s Fire: The Academy of Ancient Music and the Historical Performance Revolution will be published next month.}

Lise Davidsen soprano
Sheku Kanneh-Mason cello

Early in his career Heitor Villa-Lobos travelled across Brazil ‘collecting’ popular and folk music, feeding what would be a lifelong curiosity about the music of his home country. He also had another enduring fascination: the music of J. S. Bach. The affinity he saw between the two inspired some of his most distinctive music. 

Between 1930 and 1945 he composed nine Bachianas brasileiras – loosely, ‘Brazilian pieces in the style of Bach’ – in which he sought to fuse Brazilian lyricism with Bach’s harmonic and contrapuntal rigour. No. 5 is scored for a solo singer and eight cellos. 

We hear the first of No. 5’s two movements tonight. Like most of the Bachianas brasileiras, it has twin titles, each nodding to one side of its mixed heritage: it is called both Ária (as Bach might have named it) and Cantilena (‘chant’ or ‘singsong’). The wistful poem at the centre of the song is gone in a flash, the harmonies sliding away from underneath the singer’s chant-like tune; the heart of the song, though, is in the long, sultry, wordless melody we hear before and after.

^{Programme note © Erica Jeal}

1 The Saucy Arethusa
2 Tom Bowling –
3 Hornpipe: Jack’s the Lad
4 Londonderry Air (Danny Boy)*
5 The Skye Boat Song* (BBC Singers only)
6 Ar lan y môr (Beside the sea)^†
7 See, the conqu’ring hero comes –
8 Rule, Britannia! (Thomas Arne, arr. Malcolm Sargent)

Lise Davidsensoprano
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (for words, see below)

Henry Wood could have been describing himself when he declared his business partner, impresario Robert Newman, was a man who ‘always had an eye on the main chance’. In 1905 they both seized the opportunity to mark the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar with a nautically themed musical extravaganza. Wood admitted he’d gone ‘the whole hog on a “sea business” programme’ for their special matinee Promenade concert on 21 October, which climaxed with his newly arranged Fantasia for Orchestra on British Sea-Songs.

Wood programmed it in succeeding years, ‘just to see how it would go’, and by the mid-1920s the Fantasia had become a Last Night fixture. It marked the start of a transformation of the season finale from a lighter evening of shorter numbers into a set ‘ritual’, in which a serious first half was followed by an increasingly nostalgic second. One year, Wood deigned to think that they’d ‘had enough of it’ and left the Fantasia off the programme, but the following Monday there were ‘so many letters of protest and disappointment’ that Wood ‘resolved never to omit it again’. 

Commemorating Nelson’s triumph over the French and Spanish navies and the Admiral’s death aboard HMS Victory, Wood’s original arrangement began with a series of six meticulously researched bugle calls used to convey orders on a naval warship, including the ‘Admiral’s Salute’. The remaining parts of the Fantasia charted the course of a battle and the triumphant return home from the perspective of a British sailor. 

Wood was a practical musician, one who revised and adapted works to suit available forces and occasions, so it is with no disrespect to him that the Fantasia has recently become something of a flexible compendium. It is regularly modified to include other British songs – sometimes in arrangements by hands other than Wood’s. In that spirit, we bypass the bugles and ‘The Anchor’s Weighed’, and launch straight into ‘The Saucy Arethusa’, which recounts an engagement in the English Channel on 17 June 1778 between HMS Arethusa and the French warship Belle Poule.

It’s unlikely that Wood’s Prommers shed the now-customary mock tears when the original cellist, Jacques Renard, performed the solo in ‘Tom Bowling’, but there’s no doubting the heartache behind Charles Dibdin’s song, written in the late 1780s in memory of his brother Thomas, a captain who perished at sea. 

Next, the action is back on deck, for a sailor’s hornpipe – ‘Jack’s the Lad’ – and the annual reminder that ‘Old Timber’ (as Wood was affectionately known) had a mischievous sense of humour:

The younger Promenaders thoroughly enjoy their part in it. They stamp their feet in time to the hornpipe – that is until I whip up the orchestra in a fierce accelerando which leaves behind all those whose stamping technique is not of the very first quality. I like to win by two bars, if possible, but sometimes have to be content with a bar and a half.

This year, three national songs are inserted at this point in the proceedings to reflect the truly British nature of the Last Night. First, to Ireland, and Bob Chilcott’s arrangement of a song whose origins lie in the mists of time. The first recorded mention of what would become known as the ‘Londonderry Air’ was from the pen of Miss Jane Ross of Limervady in 1855, and it was subsequently immortalised by F. E. Weatherly’s lyrics ‘Danny Boy’. Across the water to Scotland, and the Jacobite lament, ‘The Skye Boat Song’, traces a fleeing Bonnie Prince Charlie on his way to the Isle of Skye, following his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Like ‘Danny Boy’, this Gaelic rowing song was also in fact written to words by an Englishman, Sir Harold Boulton, in the 1880s; his collaborator Annie MacLeod adapted the tune long known as ‘The Cuckoo in the Grove’. This lilting arrangement, together with the pipe-infused ‘Londonderry Air’, was specially arranged by Chilcott for the Last Night in 2005 and dedicated to the BBC Singers. This year the trio is completed by Gareth Glyn’s tender take on the traditional Welsh love song, ‘Ar lan y môr’ (Beside the sea).

Wood’s sailor then makes a victorious return to the strains of George Frideric Handel’s ‘See, the conqu’ring hero comes’. Originally written for Joshua, the hit chorus became synonymous with Judas Maccabaeus after Handel inserted it into a revised version of the oratorio, which commemorated the Duke of Cumberland’s victorious homecoming from the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

Wood concluded his Fantasia with an orchestral rendition of ‘Rule, Britannia!’, from Thomas Arne’s 1740 patriotic masque Alfred. But tonight this finale is performed in the popular arrangement made by the real showman of the Last Night podium, Malcolm Sargent, whose version restored Arne’s vocal soloist and martial introduction. 

^{Programme note © Hannah French
Hannah French is a BBC Radio 3 presenter and the author of Sir Henry Wood: Champion of J. S. Bach (Boydell & Brewer, 2019).}

Soprano
When Britain first at Heavn’s command
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:

Choirs and audience
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.

Soprano
Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful, from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies,
Serves but to root the native oak.

Choirs and audience
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.

Soprano
The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair.
Blest Isle! With matchless beauty crown’d,
And manly hearts to guard the fair.

Choirs and audience
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.

^{atrrib. James Thomson (1700–48)} 

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (for words, see below)

For many years it was fashionable to regard Elgar – on the flimsy evidence of his moustachioed Edwardian looks, and a more credible record of writing stirring marches for ceremonial occasions – as the musical embodiment of the British Empire. After all, in a magazine interview of 1904 he declared, ‘I have something of the soldier in me.’ But in earlier remarks about his successful Imperial March, written in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the composer stated pragmatically that ‘I know that there are a lot of people who like to celebrate events with music. To these people I have given tunes. Is that wrong?’ 

In 1901 Elgar knew that he had another hit theme on his hands, confiding to his young friend Dora Penny (‘Dorabella’ of the ‘Enigma’ Variations): ‘I’ve got a tune that will knock ’em – knock ’em flat.’ The tune in question was the central trio section of the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D major, premiered with its A minor sibling (No. 2) on 19 October 1901 at the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, with the Liverpool Orchestral Society; although it was originally thought to have been conducted by the work’s dedicatee, Alfred Rodewald, recent research confirms that the composer himself was in charge of the first performance. The title comes from Shakespeare’s Othello: ‘Farewell … Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!’. Elgar’s prediction for his epic tune proved correct: at a further performance a few days after the premiere, Proms founder-conductor Henry Wood had to give an unprecedented double encore to satisfy a crowd who had ‘risen and yelled’. 

Artists often talk about launching a work into the world, where it finds a life of its own. But Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 was a gift that kept on giving for Elgar: at the instigation of the contralto Clara Butt, in 1902 Elgar incorporated the trio section of the march into the final movement of his Coronation Ode, composed for the coronation of King Edward VII. The words were by A. C. Benson, a poet and master at Eton; subsequent modifications to the text at publisher Boosey’s request allowed ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ to become the standalone piece that is now an indispensable part of the Last Night of the Proms rituals.

^{Programme note © Graeme Kay}

Choirs and audience
Land of Hope and Glory,
Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee
Who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty,
Make thee mightier yet.

^{Arthur Christopher Benson (1862–1925)}

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (for words, see below)

Jerusalem is an extremely artful piece of composition. The text is by William Blake (1757–1827) and is contained in the preface to his epic Milton: A Poem in Two Books, written between 1804 and 1810. The music follows the words closely, the text describing a perfect musical arc through the climactic points of each verse (‘Was Jerusalem builded here?’ and ‘Till we have built Jerusalem’) then down again to the ‘dark Satanic mills’ and ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

Ironically, the music for both verses shares a problem with ‘God Save the King’ – it ends on a falling phrase, one of the reasons why the UK national anthem is thought to be a bit pedestrian. But Parry solves this by adding a short tail-piece, or coda, that finishes on a high.

Blake’s poem lay undisturbed for much of the 19th century. In 1916 poet laureate Robert Bridges included it in an anthology, The Spirit of Man, which was intended to fortify readers’ spirits at a time when the world was facing destruction and slaughter on a wholly unprecedented scale. It therefore made perfect sense for Bridges to ask Parry to set Milton’s text to music for a meeting of Fight for Right, a nascent movement intended to boost morale among Britain’s beleaguered soldiers.

Initially reluctant because of the ultra-patriotic tone of Fight for Right’s campaign, Parry overcame his reservations, eventually telling his former student Walford Davies, its first conductor: ‘Here’s a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it.’

Jerusalem was an instant hit. In November 1916 Parry orchestrated it, and in 1922, four years after his death in 1918, Edward Elgar, who admired Parry, made the lush and luxurious orchestral arrangement that is usually heard today; Elgar’s version was premiered that year at the first Leeds Festival to take place after the war. 

The conductor Malcolm Sargent introduced Jerusalem to the Proms in the 1950s. It is now a staple, alongside ‘Rule, Britannia!’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, of the audience participation element in the Last Night festivities.

^{Programme note © Graeme Kay}

Choirs and audience
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

I will not cease from mental fight;
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

^{William Blake (1757–1827)}

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (verse 2 only; for words, see below)

As a piece of music, the UK National Anthem is something to be performed dutifully and respectfully. But we might be forgiven for looking a little enviously across the Channel to the rabble-rousing Marseillaise of France or the gloriously operatic Il canto degli Italiani for an anthem that really sets the pulses racing. The remarkable thing about Britten’s arrangement is that it achieves precisely this effect, through a highly daring and dramatic compositional scheme which is effectively realised in a piece which lasts less than three minutes.

Written in 1961 for the Leeds Festival, Britten’s arrangement is described by publishers Boosey & Hawkes as ‘conceived as a single crescendo, building powerfully from a simple pianissimo opening to a resounding fortissimo close’.

After a hushed opening chord and drum roll, the mostly unaccompanied chorus intones the first verse pianissimo, in varied harmonies – exactly the opposite of what one might expect to convey words that are a supplication for, and exclamation about, royal glory. Then a chain of rising orchestral scales ushers in the brass, snare drum and a substantial upward key-change as the chorus surges into verse two, the energy of both the singing and fanfares intensifying towards the twice-repeated (with added cymbal crashes) ‘God save the King’. 

In all, Britten composed four works for the royal family; this National Anthem arrangement was associated with the opening in 1967 of both the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and Snape Maltings Concert Hall in Suffolk (the latter being the home of Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival).

^{Programme note © Graeme Kay}

Choirs only
God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King!

Choirs and audience
Thy choicest gifts in store
On him be pleased to pour,
Long may he reign;
May he defend our laws
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice:
God save the King!
God save the King!
God save the King!

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (for words, see below)

Over 50 years before Malcolm Sargent created the Last Night we recognise today, spontaneous renditions of Auld Lang Syne began to be sung at the close of the Proms season. For Henry Wood’s Prommers, entertained by a single group of orchestral musicians night after night for more than two months, this most nostalgic of songs marked a fitting way to bid farewell to their ‘auld acquaintance’. 

With its three-word title that translates literally as ‘old long since’, it’s a song with roots in Scottish days of yore. Whether it originated as a ballad about a faithless lover or as a country wedding dance tune, we have Robert Burns to thank for preserving lyrics he transcribed from ‘an old man’s singing’, before adding his own verses. 

Tonight we hear the song in a version prepared for the 2018 Last Night by Belfast-born composer-arranger Paul Campbell. No stranger to the BBC Proms, he has frequently collaborated with John Wilson in reconstructing MGM scores. Campbell has also arranged Robert Burns’s songs Ae fond kiss and My love is like a red, red rose for Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti. 

^{Programme note © Hannah French}

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o’ lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup of kindness yet
For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup of kindness yet
For auld lang syne.

^{Robert Burns (1759–96)}

^{Digital programme produced by BBC Proms Publications}