10/9/10, Royal Albert Hall
1 hr 30 mins. Late-night Prom featuring the new incarnation of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, fronted by Arthur Jeffes, son of the original's founder-composer, Simon Jeffes. An 11-piece, joined by Kathryn Tickell (on both Northumbrian small pipes and fiddle), playing lots of Simon Jeffes' tunes and a handful of Arthur's, including a solo piano piece he wrote for his father's memorial service (SJ died in 1997) which he played as an encore.
Most of the old favourites were there, and they haven't lost their catchiness. We had Music for a Found Harmonium, Perpetuum Mobile, Giles Farnaby's Dream, Telephone and Rubber Band, all of which we have on disc at home. Plus some I didn't know like Organum (on which Tickell played the pipes) and Swing the Cat (in which she joined in some very fast fiddle ensemble playing, folk-style, much better in this performance than in a recording we've heard).
The line-up is very different from the original, which only had one ukelele (not three on occasions), didn't have a double bass, did have a trombone etc etc. This had two percussionists and Jeffes on piano, with only one guitarist. It meant the sound had a very different texture, and crucially was poorly served in the hall by the mix (it might have been different for listeners at home...). To begin with we could hardly hear the cello and the other strings, and though it got better it still wasn't entirely satisfactory.
Also Arthur's pieces (with the exception of the piano solo) aren't in the same league as his dad's, while some of the slower pieces had me drifting off (it was late night...)
All the musicians were pretty straight with the exception of one of the violinists who wore black plus-fours or jodhpurs and a black top hat and pranced around centre stage in a very "look at me" kind of way.
I'm glad we went but I think we'll stick to recordings of the original in future.
Showing posts with label prom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prom. Show all posts
Friday, 10 September 2010
Monday, 6 September 2010
HENRY WOOD PROM
5/8/10, Royal Albert Hall
2 hrs 20 mins. Ulster Orchestra with Paul Watkins and pianist Stephen Osborne. Orchestra all in black except for Watkins in a lounge suit with white shirt and tie. A good night for the brass, with fanfares and marches galore. But the hall very empty, despite the crowd-pleasing nature of the programme, perhaps because there'd been a free Prom all afternoon recreating (with the addition of a 2010 world premiere BBC commission!) the last night of Henry Wood's 1910 Proms. The arena in particular very sparsely filled. This programme all works which had been premiered (or at least introduced to British audiences) by Henry Wood at the Proms.
There was a fanfare by Arnold Bax (or Sir Arthur Bliss?) written for Henry Wood's 70th birthday in 1944, noisy and brassy, and then A London Pageant by Bliss (or Bax?). It's a piece of light music really, a march, very silly. It comes to a crashing brass climax twice, only for the violins to keep going underneath very quietly; there's a discordant shift to the minor halfway through but it doesn't last, it's purely for effect. At the end there's an enormous climax with all the brass, the kitchen sink and the Albert Hall organ (the organist was wearing ear defenders)! It made me laugh. The string sound very English (ie sub-Elgar).
Then we had Dorothy Howell's Lamia, premiered in 1919 when she was 21. I'd never heard of her. She lived until 1982, dying at the age of 84 after a blameless life teaching at the Royal Academy of Music. So why, on the evidence of this, did she not compose more? It starts very softly and discordantly with just two flutes. It ends very softly on a dying fall played by the strings, just after a rather haunting solo by the leader. In between some lovely string music and colourful orchestration, plus the odd melody. Passed 12 minutes very agreeably.
Then Osborne played Rachmaninov's first piano concerto. I don't know this, but I suspect it was a rather spiky interpretation of the slow movement, which I'm sure is supposed to be lusher and more tuneful than the version Osborne gave us. The slow movement is also very short, but then the final movement has a crashing false start followed by a thoughtful piano solo before the finale proper starts, so you get two slow movements in effect. D liked it very much. Osborne played with a score and a blonde page-turner: the first time I've seen a soloist using a score in a piece from the core repertoire.
Part 2 started with Sibelius's Karelia Suite. Not as driven as some performances I've heard, but in the finale there were numerous swoops and twiddly bits from the horns and the brass I've never been aware of in recorded or broadcast performances. One quiet bit was ruined by coughing.
Parry's Symphonic Suite was inoffensive and rose to a suitable climax (brass-heavy, of course, and rather Elgarian) but my quota of concentration available for unfamiliar music was exhausted.
Then Tchaikovsky's waltz and march from Eugene Onegin. Familiar, tuneful, noisy: what's not to like? (Hard to credit that this was "new music" in Henry Wood's time.)
The Prommers may have hoped for an encore, but Watkins marched on after two or three curtain calls, looked pointedly at his watch and dragged the leader off.
2 hrs 20 mins. Ulster Orchestra with Paul Watkins and pianist Stephen Osborne. Orchestra all in black except for Watkins in a lounge suit with white shirt and tie. A good night for the brass, with fanfares and marches galore. But the hall very empty, despite the crowd-pleasing nature of the programme, perhaps because there'd been a free Prom all afternoon recreating (with the addition of a 2010 world premiere BBC commission!) the last night of Henry Wood's 1910 Proms. The arena in particular very sparsely filled. This programme all works which had been premiered (or at least introduced to British audiences) by Henry Wood at the Proms.
There was a fanfare by Arnold Bax (or Sir Arthur Bliss?) written for Henry Wood's 70th birthday in 1944, noisy and brassy, and then A London Pageant by Bliss (or Bax?). It's a piece of light music really, a march, very silly. It comes to a crashing brass climax twice, only for the violins to keep going underneath very quietly; there's a discordant shift to the minor halfway through but it doesn't last, it's purely for effect. At the end there's an enormous climax with all the brass, the kitchen sink and the Albert Hall organ (the organist was wearing ear defenders)! It made me laugh. The string sound very English (ie sub-Elgar).
Then we had Dorothy Howell's Lamia, premiered in 1919 when she was 21. I'd never heard of her. She lived until 1982, dying at the age of 84 after a blameless life teaching at the Royal Academy of Music. So why, on the evidence of this, did she not compose more? It starts very softly and discordantly with just two flutes. It ends very softly on a dying fall played by the strings, just after a rather haunting solo by the leader. In between some lovely string music and colourful orchestration, plus the odd melody. Passed 12 minutes very agreeably.
Then Osborne played Rachmaninov's first piano concerto. I don't know this, but I suspect it was a rather spiky interpretation of the slow movement, which I'm sure is supposed to be lusher and more tuneful than the version Osborne gave us. The slow movement is also very short, but then the final movement has a crashing false start followed by a thoughtful piano solo before the finale proper starts, so you get two slow movements in effect. D liked it very much. Osborne played with a score and a blonde page-turner: the first time I've seen a soloist using a score in a piece from the core repertoire.
Part 2 started with Sibelius's Karelia Suite. Not as driven as some performances I've heard, but in the finale there were numerous swoops and twiddly bits from the horns and the brass I've never been aware of in recorded or broadcast performances. One quiet bit was ruined by coughing.
Parry's Symphonic Suite was inoffensive and rose to a suitable climax (brass-heavy, of course, and rather Elgarian) but my quota of concentration available for unfamiliar music was exhausted.
Then Tchaikovsky's waltz and march from Eugene Onegin. Familiar, tuneful, noisy: what's not to like? (Hard to credit that this was "new music" in Henry Wood's time.)
The Prommers may have hoped for an encore, but Watkins marched on after two or three curtain calls, looked pointedly at his watch and dragged the leader off.
Sunday, 22 August 2010
PROM
21/8/10, Royal Albert Hall
2hrs 15 mins. Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra under Yannick Nezet-Seguin. Wagner's Tannhauser overture, Mahler's Ruckert-Lieder and Beethoven's Third Symphony (the Eroica).
The Wagner stirring at the start but lacked the frisson at the end. Perhaps he took it a bit too slowly. Perhaps the brass (three trombones, three trumpets, tuba) just weren't loud enough. But wonderful stuff nonetheless. I always feel guilty liking Wagner: it's like listening to chocolate ice cream. He makes it all too easy...
The singer in the Mahler was baritone Simon Keenlyside, in white tie like the band (M Nezet-Seguin, on the other hand, was in a suit with a black T-shirt). We didn't know these songs and foolishly didn't buy a programme until the interval so we were a trifle at sea. Settings of poems by Friederich Ruckert (b 1788), whose portrait in the programme (shoulder length dark curls, open-collared white shirt, firm chin, dark eyes under darker brows) positively shrieks "Romantic poet". He also wrote the Kindertotenlieder.
Five songs, not written as a sequence and in one case not even orchestrated by Mahler himself, who left just a piano setting. In the order we heard them the first two were broadly positive: one is about the fragrance of lime, the other, "Blicke mir nick in die Lieder" or "Look not at my songs", is a coy little number about not looking over the poet's shoulder until he's finished. The best was the third, "Um mitternach", which was also the longest and for the most part scored just for the voice and the woodwind, except that at the end the brass come in (the only one of the songs in which they do), until a coda for the strings in which the whole thing fades beautifully away to a silence. Just before it did some philistine coughed loudly.
Both the Wagner and the Mahler started very quietly and Nezet-Seguin gave us plenty of time to settle. The Beethoven starts with a pair of emphatic notes from virtually the entire orchestra and they were playing the moment he was on the podium and before the applause fell away (D was leaning over to me and had just started to whisper something). Commendable urgency, but it couldn't keep me awake. It's been a very tiring couple of weeks. It's familiar stuff, very splendid, and must have been staggering when first composed, but it's 50 minutes long and I did feel, especially in the first movement, that he goes on a bit. The audience of course loved it.
Saturday, 21 August 2010
PROM
19/8/10, Royal Albert Hall
3 hrs. The BBC Scottish Symphony with Martyn Brabbins and a Mozart overture, Liszt piano concerto, Sheherazade, then after the interview an unlistenable new work by James Dillon and Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony. I was knackered and it was a long concert, so the second half was a bit of a blur.
The Mozart (Der Schauspieldirektor) was short, polite and inoffensive. The Liszt was played by Boris Giltburg, replacing Boris Berezovsky for "contractual reasons", whatever that means (a row about the fee? double booking?). It's a serious work but for the first two movements piano and orchestra could have been playing separate pieces. The pianist delivers himself of a great tract of noisy, dramatic, flamboyant, romantic angst; the orchestra plays a few notes; the soloist starts up again while the orchestra rests its instruments and watches. There's more integration, more dialogue in the third movement, but overall the impression was unsatisfactory. Yet the Prommers loved the soloist, who was brought back for a (lengthy) encore.
Sherehezade is long too. I'd forgotten how long, even though it's almost tediously familiar thanks to an Ann Rachlin tape we used to play in the car when the kids were young. But it is marvellous, colourful stuff with great tunes and orchestral effects (and hearing a work in live performance with whoch you're already familiar is usually more a help than a hindrance because it enables you to spot differences in interpretation and emphasis). Half the orchestra seemed to be employed as soloists at one point or another. The "Sheherezade" passages for solo violin and harp and the woodwind solos were particularly attractive. And it boasted six percussionists. It also had a third trumpeter who sat mute throughout the first two movements and only raised his instrument briefly in the third, much to our relief (D nudged me to make sure I didn't miss it: he'd become a positive distraction).
The Dillon (called La Navette) was a long drone involving at times the whole orchestra, with the usual cliches: sudden brief eruptions from the brass; little twiddly bits, equally sudden, equally arbitrary, from the woodwind; every conceivable type of percussion.
The Tchaikovsky (which we didn't know) was enjoyable and accessible and culminated in a typical Tchaikobsky march which he flogged to death, typically, repeating it over and over until it threatened to become a pain.
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
RUSSIAN PROM
15/8/10, Royal Albert Hall
London Philharmonic Orchestra with Vladimir Jurowski. The Musorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov Night on the Bare Mountain; Shostakovich Violin Concerto No1 with Julia Fischer; Scrabin's Reverie (very short, very slight); Prokofiev's Symphony No 3.
The Musorgsky was thrilling. Lots of orchestral colour. The Shostakovich was spectacular, exciting, impassioned, tortured; the third movement ends with a cadenza which seemed to go on for ever. Ms Fischer went down an absolute storm with the Prommers and was brought back for an encore.
The Prokofiev not really to my taste (I do try, really I do, but it always sounds like under-developed film music). And my concentration goes late in the evening.
BRANDENBURG CONCERTOS
14/8/10, Cadogan Hall (Proms)
A double concert, 1 hr 10 mins starting at 11.30, and then another 1 hr 10 mins at 1.30. We had a sandwich in Sloane Square in G and J in between. All the Brandenburgs played by the English Baroque Soloists with/under John Eliot Gardner, who actually conducted only three of the six, sitting out the others at the side of the stage with the Radio 3 announcer Violet Elizabeth Bott, and entertaining both audiences (on the radio and in the hall) with his witty apercus in between each concerto.
I learnt a lot about music which is (some of it, at any rate) almost tediously familiar. They weren't played in order, presumably because there's no evidence of the order in which they were written, only the order in the manuscript in which they were found in 1849. Bach presented them to a member of an obscure branch of the Hohenzollerns, the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt, although they hadn't been written for him and his household lacked the musicians to play them.
We started with No 1, which begins with two horns (up in the Cadogan Hall balcony) playing what sounds like completely different music to the rest of the band: an extraordinarily discordant row. After the opening allegro they came down into the body of the kirk and played much more harmoniously in a subsequent movement. I thought it was just me, so was relieved to hear Eliot Gardiner remark on how discordant the opening is.
Then we had No 6, for strings alone (but no violins), followed by No 4, which JEG returned to conduct.
The second concert started with No 3, which has just two movements separated by a cadenza which Bach didn't write but (if memory serves) the principal violinist played at length.
No 5 is extraordinary, according to JEG, because it's arguably the first "modern" keyboard concerto in which the harpsichord goes beyond its conventional continuo role at the start of the piece to become a true solo instrument in the middle... and then lapsing back to continuo in the final movement. It was very effective -- and all the more so because we'd been primed to look out for it.
We ended with No 2 conducted by JEG, the only one of the six to feature a trumpet, and very stirring it is too.
I enjoyed this greatly, possible because it was the middle of the day and I was wide awake. Should we have more concerts in the mornings?
A double concert, 1 hr 10 mins starting at 11.30, and then another 1 hr 10 mins at 1.30. We had a sandwich in Sloane Square in G and J in between. All the Brandenburgs played by the English Baroque Soloists with/under John Eliot Gardner, who actually conducted only three of the six, sitting out the others at the side of the stage with the Radio 3 announcer Violet Elizabeth Bott, and entertaining both audiences (on the radio and in the hall) with his witty apercus in between each concerto.
I learnt a lot about music which is (some of it, at any rate) almost tediously familiar. They weren't played in order, presumably because there's no evidence of the order in which they were written, only the order in the manuscript in which they were found in 1849. Bach presented them to a member of an obscure branch of the Hohenzollerns, the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt, although they hadn't been written for him and his household lacked the musicians to play them.
We started with No 1, which begins with two horns (up in the Cadogan Hall balcony) playing what sounds like completely different music to the rest of the band: an extraordinarily discordant row. After the opening allegro they came down into the body of the kirk and played much more harmoniously in a subsequent movement. I thought it was just me, so was relieved to hear Eliot Gardiner remark on how discordant the opening is.
Then we had No 6, for strings alone (but no violins), followed by No 4, which JEG returned to conduct.
The second concert started with No 3, which has just two movements separated by a cadenza which Bach didn't write but (if memory serves) the principal violinist played at length.
No 5 is extraordinary, according to JEG, because it's arguably the first "modern" keyboard concerto in which the harpsichord goes beyond its conventional continuo role at the start of the piece to become a true solo instrument in the middle... and then lapsing back to continuo in the final movement. It was very effective -- and all the more so because we'd been primed to look out for it.
We ended with No 2 conducted by JEG, the only one of the six to feature a trumpet, and very stirring it is too.
I enjoyed this greatly, possible because it was the middle of the day and I was wide awake. Should we have more concerts in the mornings?
Friday, 4 September 2009
VARIOUS PROMS
25/8/09 and 1/9/09, Royal Albert Hall (Proms)
25/8/09
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Roger Norrington with Joyce DiDonato singing; in the second half they played Mendelssohn's Symphony No 3, the Scottish.
I failed to make proper notes at the time but I did scribble in the programme. We had Purcell's suite from the incidental music to Abdelazer, and then La DiDonato came on in a green, full-skirted strapless dress to sing Ombra mai fu from Xerxes and Ah mio cor from Alcina. The former was funereal, though she sounded gorgeous. The second was much better, faster, and there was something she did at the segue into the middle section unaccompanied when her voice soared and fell and changed key and all sorts, and we all held our breath.
And then we had Handel's Water Music, which is too familiar and I fell asleep.
And that was followed by our Joyce back for Haydn's Scena di Berenice which is a splendidly dramatic concert aria. She was great: lyrical, highly dramatic, thrillingly low at times.
The Mendelssohn contrasts light and dark in the first movement (the Scots weather?), first brassy, then flute and clarinet. There are lovely melodies in the third movement. And a bouncy finish.
G didn't like Norrington: he thinks he's a show-off, turning to the audience at the end and bouncing like a schoolboy.
1/9/09
Royal Concertgebouw with Mariss Janson doing Haydn's Symphony No 100, the Military, and Shostakovich's Symphony No 10.
I failed to make a note at the time and remember nothing of it.
The reviews below help bring some of it back, notably the four percussionists marching on at the end of the Haydn.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/6126100/BBC-Proms-Mariss-Jansons-and-the-Royal-Concertgebouw-Orchestra.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/06/bbc-proms-classical-music-review-maddocks
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b2f6ada-98aa-11de-aa1b-00144feabdc0.html
1/9/09
Late-night Prom with the Michael Nyman Band.
Initially riveting: loud, repetitive, rhythmic with a spectacular sense of impetus and drive. Think Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds, the theme tune from The Draughtsman's Contract.
The trouble is, they all sound like that: same minimalist techniques, same (amplified) instrumentation.
Alas it became boring in the end
25/8/09
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Roger Norrington with Joyce DiDonato singing; in the second half they played Mendelssohn's Symphony No 3, the Scottish.
I failed to make proper notes at the time but I did scribble in the programme. We had Purcell's suite from the incidental music to Abdelazer, and then La DiDonato came on in a green, full-skirted strapless dress to sing Ombra mai fu from Xerxes and Ah mio cor from Alcina. The former was funereal, though she sounded gorgeous. The second was much better, faster, and there was something she did at the segue into the middle section unaccompanied when her voice soared and fell and changed key and all sorts, and we all held our breath.
And then we had Handel's Water Music, which is too familiar and I fell asleep.
And that was followed by our Joyce back for Haydn's Scena di Berenice which is a splendidly dramatic concert aria. She was great: lyrical, highly dramatic, thrillingly low at times.
The Mendelssohn contrasts light and dark in the first movement (the Scots weather?), first brassy, then flute and clarinet. There are lovely melodies in the third movement. And a bouncy finish.
G didn't like Norrington: he thinks he's a show-off, turning to the audience at the end and bouncing like a schoolboy.
1/9/09
Royal Concertgebouw with Mariss Janson doing Haydn's Symphony No 100, the Military, and Shostakovich's Symphony No 10.
I failed to make a note at the time and remember nothing of it.
The reviews below help bring some of it back, notably the four percussionists marching on at the end of the Haydn.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/6126100/BBC-Proms-Mariss-Jansons-and-the-Royal-Concertgebouw-Orchestra.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/06/bbc-proms-classical-music-review-maddocks
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b2f6ada-98aa-11de-aa1b-00144feabdc0.html
1/9/09
Late-night Prom with the Michael Nyman Band.
Initially riveting: loud, repetitive, rhythmic with a spectacular sense of impetus and drive. Think Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds, the theme tune from The Draughtsman's Contract.
The trouble is, they all sound like that: same minimalist techniques, same (amplified) instrumentation.
Alas it became boring in the end
Saturday, 1 August 2009
BACH MOTETS
28/7/09, Royal Albert Hall (Prom)
1 hr 20 mins. Late-night Prom with John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir plus soloists (chamber organ, double bass, two cellos, bassoon). Too late for me: this kind of music needs concentration which is hard to summon at ten pm; I kept falling asleep, left with a general impression of tuneful noise.
Thirty-eight singers, four motets, three of them with split choirs placed either side of the organ; the third a single choir (though six of the women dropped out for part of it, and there was a beautiful section for tenor, bass and soprano.
The motet was apparently a more old fashioned form than the cantata, for which Bach is best known. Cantatas include instrumental passages, solo singers and a lot more colour and variation. Some of his more puritan contemporaries deplored cantatas as excessively "operatic". But they were more involving, more emotionally rewarding apparently than motets.
I'm not qualified to judge. All of these seemed to me pretty sophisticated works. When Petroc Trelawny came on stage for the Radio 3 intro he interviewed Gardiner and asked if it was "too simple to say Bach's motets were unsophisticated" Gardiner replied flatly "It's wrong": that got a laugh.
I remain impressed by Bach rather than moved or seduced. There's something a little too perfect about the surface textures of all that choral singing. And you can't understand the words, unlike much of Handel, which makes a big difference.
But these pieces displayed great variety of tempo and texture and some pretty tunes.
Some reviews:
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/concerts/prom09-17-0709.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/29/cbso-nelsons-monteverdi-choir-gardiner
1 hr 20 mins. Late-night Prom with John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir plus soloists (chamber organ, double bass, two cellos, bassoon). Too late for me: this kind of music needs concentration which is hard to summon at ten pm; I kept falling asleep, left with a general impression of tuneful noise.
Thirty-eight singers, four motets, three of them with split choirs placed either side of the organ; the third a single choir (though six of the women dropped out for part of it, and there was a beautiful section for tenor, bass and soprano.
The motet was apparently a more old fashioned form than the cantata, for which Bach is best known. Cantatas include instrumental passages, solo singers and a lot more colour and variation. Some of his more puritan contemporaries deplored cantatas as excessively "operatic". But they were more involving, more emotionally rewarding apparently than motets.
I'm not qualified to judge. All of these seemed to me pretty sophisticated works. When Petroc Trelawny came on stage for the Radio 3 intro he interviewed Gardiner and asked if it was "too simple to say Bach's motets were unsophisticated" Gardiner replied flatly "It's wrong": that got a laugh.
I remain impressed by Bach rather than moved or seduced. There's something a little too perfect about the surface textures of all that choral singing. And you can't understand the words, unlike much of Handel, which makes a big difference.
But these pieces displayed great variety of tempo and texture and some pretty tunes.
Some reviews:
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/concerts/prom09-17-0709.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/29/cbso-nelsons-monteverdi-choir-gardiner
THE FAIRY QUEEN
21/7/09, Royal Albert Hall (Prom)
The Glyndebourne production of Purcell's "opera", semi-staged. The music of course was wonderful. The huge bleeding chunks of Midsummer Nights Dream, which might have worked well in a smaller theatre, got totally lost in the vastness of the Albert Hall.
I failed to make a note at the time and now, a month on, I can remember little of the detail. Desmond Barrit as Bottom was funny. Several of the other performances were intelligent, though the young lovers were colourless, as they often are, in white nighty-type things (in D's phrase).
D can't remember anything of the music either, though both of us recall that staging and music alike were witty and we laughed quite a lot. Conducted by William Christie with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, who can do no wrong.
Here are some reviews:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/22/prom-7-fairy-queen-review
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/proms/article6723306.ece
The Glyndebourne production of Purcell's "opera", semi-staged. The music of course was wonderful. The huge bleeding chunks of Midsummer Nights Dream, which might have worked well in a smaller theatre, got totally lost in the vastness of the Albert Hall.
I failed to make a note at the time and now, a month on, I can remember little of the detail. Desmond Barrit as Bottom was funny. Several of the other performances were intelligent, though the young lovers were colourless, as they often are, in white nighty-type things (in D's phrase).
D can't remember anything of the music either, though both of us recall that staging and music alike were witty and we laughed quite a lot. Conducted by William Christie with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, who can do no wrong.
Here are some reviews:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/22/prom-7-fairy-queen-review
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/proms/article6723306.ece
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