Opening Night of the BBC Proms

To wrap up our summer Philharmonic Society festival trip, we finished in London with a couple of plays – Warhorse and Pricilla, Queen of the Desert - and the opening night of the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall with a performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Here is a clip of that performance:

Youtube has disabled the embedding for this second video I want to share with you, so here is a link to another clip of the 2006 Proms final night conducted by my old friend Sir Mark Elder. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ0oCmDXrVk

Food in London is great. Try St. John, J. Sheekey (the best seafood) and Just St. James (in early summer you have to have the Jersey gold potatoes and you will find Nutbourne Wine here).

Glyndebourne, East Sussex, England

Glyndebourne is the ultimate opera theme park. You are in beautiful East Sussex, 50 miles south of London, in countryside with fields of sheep, herds of deer, rolling downs and the occasional fox. Glyndebourne has superb productions in wonderful acoustics, dining at the long interval either in one of the restaurants or at a meadow picnic, and people- watching the fascinating, British opera goers, all right out of Central Casting. Weather permitting (which it did for us), the effect is a life experience. Here is our group of Philharmonic folks in one of our better pictures taken by our driver Graham, who is the best, by the way.

The vocal discovery of this trip to Glyndebourne – the Korean tenor Yonghoon Lee. His Macduff moment in Verdi’s Macbeth was stunning. He has a big voice and a passionate presence on stage. I missed him at the Bowl in Dudamel’s Carmen first of August. Reports from that performance echo my Glyndebourne experience. Check him out and keep him on the radar.

Look for and drink Nutbourne Wine while you are in Sussex.