The BBC has been challenged this year.
Auntie is to be congratulated on delivering a short Proms programme; one which sounds fine at home on the wireless. If you are actually at the Albert Hall a Prom needs to be on a big, Cecil B DeMille, scale. The Albert Hall is wholly unsuited to anything less. Do you remember Jeremy Irons singing at the Last Night in 1999? He has a good voice but not a big voice. He can just about fill a jam jar. Last week Mozart’s Requiem was just the ticket. But Auntie must cut her corsets to fit her cloth (that doesn’t sound right) and there’s not much of the latter around. So audiences flock in to hear a harpist and a chap who plays a kora, something I’d possibly like to hear at Wiggers.
“She plays the harp, he plays the West African kora (harp-lute) and together they present a unique meeting of cultures and a musical partnership of rare empathy. Whether influenced by Bach or by nature and migration, Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita draw on their connections as well as their distinctive roots, the two instruments sharing ancient associations of storytelling and courtly entertainment.
The pair have garnered awards from fRoots and Songlines as well as no fewer than three accolades at the 2019 Radio 2 Folk Awards. Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita take over the Royal Albert Hall in an atmospheric exploration that embraces the worlds of folk, non-Western and contemporary music in their Proms debut as a duo.” (BBC website)
Never mind there’s plenty of good stuff on the menu before the season ends on 11th September.
When I lived in the Gambia in the 1970s there were kora players who, usually, were descended from long lines of family musicians and praise singers. There was one who played at my leaving party and sang a delightful song about the (regretted) death of a hippopotamus. This was long before there were festivals of “world music” but it was genuinely lovely music. It would certainly be more appropriately played in a chamber music setting.