Royal Albert Hall
It's been a hot and sunny bank holiday Monday, though I have been working from home today, covering the fort. Not too stressful, with reduced hours of 10am-3pm, and it stays pretty cool in my old house. I haven't been running for a few days, so I do a 6k afterwards.
After all this, I am sitting comfortably in my tub chair, so I press play on BBC Sounds and today's Prom begins [a couple of hours behind the live schedule]. The Story Fairy is late and, not for the first time in my life, I'm wondering what I'm doing here [this is Taylor Swift all over again]. I think the story is that the story itself is lost, and we are on a quest to find it.
I giggle to myself, because the incidental music is actually reminding me of the Anglo-Amalgamated Carry On films. The orchestral music on those films was top notch as a matter of fact, but further to that I think we'll draw a discreet veil over the topic.
While I'm sure there's a captive audience at the Royal Albert Hall, somehow I'm struggling to imagine preschoolers being glued to Radio 3 at home. Maybe there's a catchment for those children who are being fed a deliberate diet of P.L. Travers, Michael Bond, and Beatrix Potter; as opposed to those on a more relaxed regimen of Cartoon Network and YouTube.
It's not long before I hear the beautiful opening of Grieg's Peer Gynt. I just love it: it's the epitome of springtime beauty expressed in music, and I think it's a great choice for introducing kids to classical music - well done whoever organised, I don't blame you for throwing that in! [This may well have been the first piece of classical music I ever became familiar with myself. I remember my parents had a CD of it, with a lilac flower on the front cover - might still have it somewhere.]
There follows a glorious roster including Pizzicato Polka by Strauss, Here Comes the Sun by George Harrison, and Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker. Christ, the kids are getting better music than we adults are! But why not? In my humble opinion, the best way to get children engaged in classical music is to make it accessible in the first instance. Just play them the good stuff, and they'll enjoy it. One or two might even be sparked into learning more for themselves.
Personally, I would have paid good money to be there.
