what it’s costing me.
intense period of music-making and people buy and the performance was a spectacular success
The other great side of the job is that I can take a
friend with me so it’s a good way of catching up
with old friends who I may not have seen for a
while. And everyone loves a free meal in a posh
restaurant so I rarely have to eat on my own.
The downside? Well, there are several. I often have
to eat a lot when I’m not really hungry. To do my
job properly, I have to try all the courses – you know
starter, main course, dessert, and sometimes I don’t
feel like eating so much, but I have to do it. I also
have a problem with my weight now – it’s very easy
to put on weight when you eat out several times a
week. In fact, most restaurant critics have a weight
problem. Another problem is that if I write a bad
review of a meal I have, it’s difficult for me to ever
go to that restaurant again, because the owner of the
restaurant will probably recognize me. Another
disadvantage of the job is that because I do it so
often, eating out has lost a lot of its attraction for
me. When the weekend comes I prefer to eat at
home rather than go out for a meal.
5.16 Nearly all foreign correspondents and war
reporters that I’ve met are people who were looking
for adventure. They’re not the kind of people who
would be happy with a nine-to-five job. They are
people who got into the job precisely because it has
very weird hours and involves going to difficult places.
I mean to some extent the things which are difficult
and potentially dangerous about the job are also the
things that made you want to do the job in the first
place and the reason why the job is so exciting.
Something else I really like about the job is that I
work as part of a team – you sit down and have
dinner together at the end of the day and talk things
through with other journalists and photographers
and you’re talking to people who have experienced
the same things as you, and seen the same things as
you. And that’s very important in this kind of work.
One of the problems of the job is seeing a lot of
horrific things and then going back home to
normality. I remember a few years ago coming back
from a war zone where I had been for a long time
and I’d seen a lot of death and destruction and I
went to a friend’s wedding in London. It was a
beautiful day, everyone was drinking champagne
and talking about unimportant things, and I wanted
to say, ‘Why can’t you see that there is something
awful happening in the world?’
Another major worry about my job these days is
the risk of being killed. Journalists used to get killed
by accident, but now there are more and more cases
of journalists being killed simply because they are
journalists, and they are also becoming the target of
kidnappers. Two of my colleagues have been
kidnapped recently and a very good friend of mine
was killed last year.
5.17 Interviewer Nicholas Kenyon was the
director of a festival of concerts called the Proms
for 12 years. How did the Proms start?
Nicholas The promenade concerts started way back
in 1895 when a brilliant impresario wanted to use
a newly-built concert hall in London, the Queen’s
Hall, for a series of popular concerts that really
brought classical music to the widest possible
audience. There were important classical concerts
during the year, but in the summer people tended
to go away, society life finished and so he had the
brilliant idea of taking away all the seats on the
floor of the hall, where the expensive people
usually sat and letting people come in and stand
there and walk around and have a very informal
experience of concert-going. The name ‘Proms’ is
an abbreviation of ‘Promenade concerts’ and it
basically means that people are able to walk
around and stand during the music
Interviewer How long do the Proms last?
Nicholas The Proms lasts for two months in the
summer, from the middle of July to the middle of
September and during that period there’s one
concert every day. Two concerts on many days,
three concerts on some days. So it’s a very very
128
season tickets in order to be able to attend all of
the concerts, whether they do or not, very few
people attend actually all of them, except me, and
they come and they queue during the day in order
to get the best places in the floor of the hall where
they stand.
Interviewer World-class musicians perform at the
Proms for much lower fees than they would
expect to receive. Why do you think that is?
Nicholas I think the Proms has an absolutely
unique atmosphere that’s what orchestras and
conductors and performers who come here say.
And so people do want to come and perform.
What you get at the Proms is a wonderful mixture
of total informality and total concentration. So
that although people don’t dress up to come to
the Proms, they behave how they want, they
actually absolutely listen to the music and that is a
feature that so many conductors and orchestras
really comment on – the level of concentration is
absolutely amazing.
5.18 Interviewer There must have been many
truly memorable concerts during your time as
director of the Proms – Could you tell us about
one of them?
Nicholas The death of Princess Diana was
particularly difficult because of course she lived
just across the road in Kensington Palace from
where the Proms happened in the Royal Albert
Hall. We changed some programmes to make
them more appropriate. On the day of her funeral,
we put in Fauré’s Requiem to the programme.
Very oddly we had programmed two or three
requiems in that last two weeks of the season and
they fitted very very well. We then lost another
major figure of the musical world, the conductor
Sir Georg Solti who was to have conducted the
Verdi Requiem on the last Friday of the season
and he had been a very good friend of Princess
Diana and indeed had rung me up just after
Diana’s death to say that he wanted to dedicate
this Verdi Requiem to her memory. As it turned
out, he died just a week later and so another
conductor, Colin Davies, took over that Verdi
Requiem and dedicated it to both of them and it
was a fantastically charged atmosphere in the hall.
I can’t remember such an electric occasion as that.
Interviewer I understand there was also another
spooky coincidence in the programme at the time
of Diana’s death? Could you tell us about it?
Nicholas A wonderful American composer called
John Adams had written an absolutely wonderful
piece which we were going to do on the last night
of the Proms in 1997. Unfortunately, I mean it
could have been called absolutely anything this
piece, it’s a whirling abstract piece of fanfare
music. Unfortunately he had called it Short ride in
a fast machine. And so it was perfectly obvious
from the first moment that we had to take that
piece out and change the programme.
Interviewer Are there any embarrassing or amusing
experiences you remember?
Nicholas One of the things that was a real challenge
to the Proms was the arrival of the mobile phone,
because in the beginning people didn’t know how
to use them, when to switch them off and the
Albert Hall is a very very big space and mobile
phones would go off in concerts and it could be
very embarrassing. Usually, because they were in
the middle of the music, conductors just ignored
them and people got embarrassed and switched
them off. But there was one particular incident
that was just so awful because Stravinsky’s The
Rite of Spring starts with a very very exposed quiet
bassoon solo and Simon Rattle and the Berlin
Philharmonic making one of their first
appearances together at the Proms had just begun
that piece when a mobile phone went off very
loudly in the stalls and Simon Rattle stopped the
bassoonist and turned round and glared at this
person in the stalls and there was a round of
applause and everything. So anyway, it restarted
and it was wonderful. But this was such an
incident, that he had actually stopped it, that it
became the subject of a lot of media attention and
there were paragraphs in the papers and I had to
go and be interviewed the next day at home for a
Radio 4 programme about mobile phones going
off in concerts, and in the middle of this interview,
my own phone went off and it’s a wonderfully
classic little bit of tape. My embarrassment at the
same thing happening to me.
5.20 Interviewer Have you ever been to a music
festival?
Anne Isle of Wight in the 70s.
Interviewer What was it like?
Anne There were just thousands and thousands of
people just chilling out doing whatever you
wanted to do. And it was just great fun – there
was music, dancing, a great memory actually.
Interviewer Have you ever been to a music festival?
Jordan Yes, we have a rock festival back home in
Ohio that we go to, a lot of my friends and I go to.
Interviewer What’s it like?
Jordan I don’t know what it’s called but it’s just like
a whole bunch of alternative music, it’s like two
days long and you all go and it’s just a fun time –
all outside. There’s a ton of people and they’re all
usually younger, from like college age usually, and
they have a whole bunch of stages set up, and
there’s just bars in different places, and you can
just go and hang out and listen to some music.
Interviewer Have you ever been to a music festival?
Mike Yes, I went to Glastonbury.
Interviewer What was it like?
Mike Incredibly muddy, incredibly muddy, but great
fun, absolutely so much fun, I didn’t get any sleep
at all, it was, so much fun.
Interviewer Have you ever been to a music festival?
Ray Yes, not for many years. When I was much
younger I went to Bath, Bath Music Blues festival,
I’ve been to Reading Music Festival. I can’t
remember which other ones I’ve been to, but yes,
in the 1970s and early 80s I went to quite a few.
Interviewer What were they like?
Ray From a 57-year-old’s point of view? Well, at the
time they were really exciting. I can remember a
long journey down to Bath, sleeping in a field, I
can remember expensive food, waiting up all
night to the see the band that you wanted to see
and then falling asleep. I can remember being
taken back to sleep in somebody’s tent then
waking up and realizing we were in the wrong
tent, and had no idea whose tent we were in the
next morning. I can remember feeling slightly sort
of sick and hungry all the time I was there, but
yeah, it was good, it was exciting.
Interviewer Have you ever been to a music festival?
Harley No. Oh, yeah, actually. The Big Chill? Yeah,
we went to the Big Chill.
Interviewer What was it like?
Harley Yeah, it was really good. I went with my dad
and my sister, we went in a camper van. So we
camped and yeah, it was good.
6.5
1 I was giving a talk to about two hundred people
in a large hotel room in Poland. About halfway
through the talk, I realized that something was
flying around the room. At first I just ignored it,
as I thought it was probably a bird that had come
in through the window, but after a while I noticed
that the women in the audience were following its
movements with their eyes and were not looking
very happy. It was then that I realized that it was a
large bat. The next moment I could see from the
audience’s eyes that it was directly above my head.
I’m really frightened of bats, and I just panicked. I
tried to carry on, but I couldn’t concentrate and I
kept forgetting what I was going to say. So I
hurried through the last part of the talk and then
as soon as I finished, I rushed out of the room. It
was awful, I’ll never forget it!
2 I get invited to talk to teachers all around the