Conductor: Tom Fetherstonhaugh
John Coltrane’s Welcome is a soothing opening to the Late Night Prom, light and dreamy, an apt hors d’oeuvre for an evening that conductor Tom Fetherstonhaugh calls ‘a concert on the theme of listening’ (as if any other concert is not). But Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean A Thing follows, energetic and easy. Then Héloïse Werner’s The Wood Pigeon, receiving the world premiere, upends the mood: Werner’s own voice directs an apparently chaotic rehearsal, goading the Fantasia Orchestra (celebrating their 10th anniversary and 4th BBC Prom) into chaos and noise before subsiding to let Fetherstonhaugh take the lead. Finally, the satirical self-consciousness of the piece drops and resolves into a cinematic composition of deep massed baritones and woodwinds that sew the seams of this piece with a tone of mysticism.
The evening is most persuasive during Evelyn Glennie’s solo extract from Vincent Ho’s Sandman’s Castle, scored from tam-tam alone. The Dame now assaults the gong, throwing her might at the giant piece of metal; now caresses it – frenzied rattling collapsing into a caring stroke – and the piece stops sounding like mere percussion and shifts the charge harshly from Coltrane’s dream state to a feeling more akin to a haunting nightmare.
The rest of the programme is a genre-hop by design. Meredith Monk’s stripped-back Panda Chant 2 – unconventionally performed by the orchestra themselves, abandoning their instruments – comes after an arrangement of Radiohead’s Pyramid Song by Simon Hale; the BBC Singers layer the track so thickly that the lyrics dissolve into verbal texture, which suits the arrangement better than clarity would have.
The night finally closes with an encore performance of Benny Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing that sends the Royal Albert Hall out on a high. The programme coheres poorly but is all cheers nonetheless, a striking contrast to the first act of the final chapter that saw Dame Glennie pattering a steel drum known as a Halo, its reverberations accreting into distant whispers, or indeed redolent of something closer to what the extraterrestrial shape of the instrument suggests: distant transmissions of something unknown.
The evening is undeniably bitty but rarely boring and never so offensive as to be merely polite.
Reviewed on 11 August 2026
