I believe in letting an invader in and then setting a good example. That is the reply Benjamin Britten gave to a tribunal for the registration of conscientious objectors in 1942 when asked "What would you do if Britain was invaded?" I was reminded of it when researching my recent article on Marco Pallis , who was an authority on both Tibetan Buddhism and early music, and, together with Britten, a champion of Purcell . In his best-selling book Peaks and Lamas , which was written in 1939, Pallis tells this story about the Sakyas , the ethnic group of which Gautama Buddha was a member which inhabited the foothills of the Himalayas. News was brought to them of an impending attack by a hostile tribe and it was debated anxiously whether resistance should be offered or not. Eventually they decided that, as followers of [Buddhist] Doctrine, they were debarred from offering armed resistance, but must welcome the invaders as friends, so they threw down their arms... The Tibetans, how...
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It's not as if the whole farrago had already been seen and dismissed in the UK two or three years ago, in - oh, I don't know, some provincial backwater like, erm, Cardiff. Presumably none of our world-class London commentators managed to make the trip that time. Or maybe they just don't read reviews of events at no-mark hicksville venues like the Wales Millennium Centre.
We provincials have our uses. We could have saved them the expense of buying four expensive tickets, for starters...
I did a guest spot on a BBC Radio 5 Live chat show about the Proms the other night. I was sat alone in the BBC studios in Norwich, everyone else was in the London.
When I mentioned the excellent Les Orientales festival in France the BBC presenter sneered at me, saying not many people can afford to go to French music festivals.
Actually they can. If, like me, you live more than a hundred miles from London (or in Cardiff even), going to a Prom involves a night in a London hotel.
I can currently get my car and two people across the Channel and back for half the price of a London hotel room which comes without breakfast, but does come with black mould in the shower and burn marks in the carpet.
The media, and the BBC in particular, think that London is the beginning and end of the classical music world. They are missing a lot as a result.