Prom 32 at the Royal Albert Hall

Above:  yesterday evening I went to Prom 32 at the Royal Albert Hall.  I am lucky if I get to one Promenade concert per year (mainly because they finish so late and it is a problem to get home).  Mild evening, large crowds but well-ordered so there was never a crush, when I got there I found I was entirely without cash, so had to forgo any refreshments.

Above:  I went into the hall through Gate 9, opposite the Albert Memorial.  The sky showed huge variations of grey.  The warm air was a little oppressive.

Above:  at the end of Mahler's Das klagende Lied (original version, as the BBC points out).  Being a mild sufferer of OCD, I have over the years segregated and refined classical music so that I now tend to just go to Schubert, Schumann and Mahler (Mahler in a concrete box on the South Bank, Mahler in a baroque church in Smith Square, Mahler on holiday in Vienna etc).  I had a seat in row 2 of the stalls, very close to the stage.  High up near the roof I could see what looked like a painted trompe l'oeil frieze of people - until some of them moved and I realised they were real.  In the row behind me was an American expatriate who spoke loudly in the interval about how he was coming to the end of five years Non-Dom status and was going back to America to avoid paying the higher tax rate ("...one of the things I will miss when I go back is the musical life in London.  I lived in New York for a while and this beats it many times over.  Of course I could never tell a New Yorker that...").