Jan Ouwens

I go to concerts a lot

The company

Martijn

Participants

  • John Miles
  • Joe Cocker
  • Cyndi Lauper
  • Shaggy
  • Van Dik Hout
  • Damian
  • Il Novecento
  • Fine Fleur

I’ll get right to the point: John Miles sang You’re the Voice! That’s two AP songs he performs at Night of the Proms in two years (last year, he did La Sagrada Familia)! Assuming of course that You’re the Voice counts as a ‘real’ AP song. I say it does :).

This years guest artists were:

  • Joe Cocker — I discovered that, while I think he’s really good, I get a little bored after 2 or 3 of his songs. He did about 7 in a row.
  • Cyndi Lauper — Better than how I remember her from the World Liberty Concert.
  • Shaggy — Er … interesting :).
  • Van Dik Hout — Famous Dutch group who unfortunately got to play only two songs.
  • Damian — Rumanian pan-pipes player. His music is a nice mix of ethnic gypsy music and modern music. I really liked him.

There was more interesting stuff going on. Since it was the 20th anniversary of NotP, they broke a couple of traditions. This worked out well in some cases, and less well in others.

Things they changed/added:

  • Segues. It happened a lot that one song flowed into the next, one song was even a complete medley. As far as I know, they never did this before, at least not as much as they did this year. For instance: one of Damian’s pieces segued right into John Miles’s Music. This was very nicely done. However, the downside was that they played only half of Music.
  • Not-really-classical classical music. For instance, they played Jeff Wayne’s The Eve of the War (segued from Danse Macabre), the Star Wars theme song, and Vangelis’s Conquest of Paradise (the latter in a really really good medley with Mars from Holst’s The Planets, Carmina Burana, and two other classical pieces that I should know the names of. I’d like to get a recording of this one.)
  • Poetry. A lesser-known Dutch comedian read a couple of poems accompanied by a ‘tapestry’ of music played by the orchestra. This was (ahem) not so great. However, this segued right into John Miles singing If You Go Away, which is a translation of a song by Jacques Brel, whom I probably like even more than AP. John Miles sure knows how to please me :). (For you Americans: If You Go Away has also been performed by, amongst others, Frank Sinatra.)

Things that were the same:

  • Guest artists. See above.
  • Actual classical music. They still did those too :).
  • La gazza ladra, with the orchestra’s percussionist playing games with the audience to the beat of the music, and while still performing his duties as percussionist. You had to be there to appreciate this :).
  • Land of Hope and Glory.
  • The closing Beatles song, sung by all the guest artists. This year, they chose Let It Be (I kind of expected With a Little Help from My Friends, because of Joe Cocker, but this was nice too :) ).

All in all, I had a great Night. I think this year it was even better than last.

Jan