Prom 2 Elgar Nigel Kennedy Finzi

Nige's triumphant return to the Proms ! Lovely performance, but poignant, for it shows how stupid the kerfuffle of 20 years ago really was. Artists have artistic personalities : they aren't the kind of people who conform. Many good ones would probably be nuts were it not for the discipline performance forces on them. Twenty years ago Nige did seem shocking, but he's been vindicated. The Proms started to veer downmarket (MUCH better this year), but Nige realised that as long as the music is high quality it doesn't matter if you dress like a punk and have attitude. In his own way, he's done as much to bring people to classical music as many others. It would probably have been a bit too much for the BBC to put Nige on the First Night, but Prom 2 made amends. Maybe now we can all get on with the music. It's the music, guys, not the packaging ! One day I suspect we'll have"Sir Nige" though I can't imagine him softening that much.

Gerald Finzi is one of my big things so I listened too for his Intimations of Immortality which doesn't get all that many live outings as it's a monster of a piece - large orchestra, large choir and tenors with the stamina to blast over them all for 45 minutes. As Finzi himself said it's a "hell of a noise, but rather a wonderful noise all told".

It has its weaknesses as it was written in a rush and it's way, way bigger than anything else the composer wrote. Stephen Banfield, Finzi's biographer, wrote that the chirpy little melody that illustrates the words "this sweet May morning" was "one of most sly pieces of mickey-mousing outside Hollywood". But for an innocent like Finzi, writing in the gloom of postwar British austerity, Hollywood represented the glowing vision Wordsworth's text describes. The vision is extravagant, so why not the music ?

In performance, it does need to be kept under reasonably tight rein, so excesses like the xylophone solo don't exaggerate and descend into The Donkey Serenade as they do on one recording. No worries here. Andrew Kennedy (no relation to Nige, they are worlds apart) was heroic. Catch the broadcast repeated on demand online, (Prom 2 Part 1 after 20 mins of Bax) and also listen to the recording by James Gilchrist with David Hill at Bournemouth (Naxos) which is the finest of all, I think.