Isla Campbell finally makes it to the Royal Albert Hall for one of this year’s 86 orchestral concerts and gets thoroughly, unexpectedly wrecked by it
This year’s BBC Proms features eighty-six concerts across eight weeks with over three thousand artists, and despite living in this city my entire adult life, I had somehow never once actually gone until this week, when I finally sat inside the Royal Albert Hall and got, frankly, completely undone by the whole thing.
Why I’d Managed To Avoid The Proms For This Long Despite Genuinely Loving Music
A vague, entirely unfounded assumption that it would be stuffy, formal, and not really for someone like me, an assumption I now recognise as embarrassingly wrong within roughly the first ten minutes of actually sitting in the hall.
What Actually Happened Once The Orchestra Started Playing
A genuinely overwhelming physical experience, the sound moving through that specific domed space in a way no recording has ever come close to replicating, which explains rather a lot about my Nan’s annual, previously mysterious Last Night tears.
How The Actual Atmosphere Inside The Hall Compared To My Stuffy Preconceptions
Considerably warmer and more genuinely mixed than I’d braced myself for, with people of every age visibly moved in their own specific way rather than the reserved, formal crowd I’d wrongly pictured beforehand.
Whether I’ll Actually Be Going Back For More Of The Remaining Concerts This Season
Definitely, having already looked up which of the remaining eighty-odd concerts I can realistically afford to attend given my usual broke-adjacent London budget.
What This Whole Evening Taught Me About Waiting Far Too Long To Try Something This Genuinely, Specifically London
Mostly that some things really do live up to the hype your own family has been quietly building for decades, and that I have wasted considerably more Last Nights than I care to admit sitting at home instead of actually being there. More London firsts continue at bohiney.com.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
