Tell me about it, Tony.  I switched on the telly after listening to the radio broadcast because I wanted to hear the encore again.  I note they had time for Debbie Wiseman - who must have been coming to the end of her stock of quotes about Wagner if she had to use that puerile quip she attributed to Oscar Wilde - and, of course, they still had time for several trailers before the next programme started.

I've now reverted to my recording of the radio broadcast - mainly to check that some clicking noises I heard during the second half were coming from something other than my radio, but also to catch that superbly-played Lohengrin again.

I also heard those noises, HtoHe. I think there's nothing wrong with your radio.

Tonight's was the first Prom this year that I'd managed to see any of on TV; what was that large square area in the middle of the arena?  For a fleeting moment I hoped it was a sort of giant trampoline, but alas, if it was, no-one was brave enough to take advantage of it.

I enjoyed what I saw of the concert but the Liebestod sounds so empty without Isolde.  And the presenter and his cronies were really rather embarrassing.

Bert
www.bertcoules.co.uk

The staging area in the centre of the Arena was, I'm told, there in preparation for Monday afternoon's concert "The Water-Diviner's Tale".  I suspect there was a rehearsal for it yesterday afternoon, and that it'll be there until Monday afternoon's prom is over.

Utterly downright stupid having the box in the middle, on such a popular night. I wouldn't be surprised if a few hundred were turned away because of it. 

Ruth, what was that I heard you saying in the interval about Parsifal fans saying that the excerpts therefrom were 'a boring interpretation'?

I thought it was a shame there couldn't be more of it, but that's just me. The Debussy in the first half however I did find rather tedious... And then the singers after the interval had intonation trouble at one point.

Wagner good, Debussy... hmm...

Sometimes MiniDiscs themselves can make that ticking sound.

There were audible thumps in the Hall itself on Wednesday, definitely of an electronic nature: one just before the orchestra started playing; either the P.A. being switched off or else a sound-reinforcement system, which sounds bizarre but might not be impossible: close attention to the FM broadcast (trombone solo in particular) suggests that there might well have been some extra amplification going on - either that or the engineers had two phase-disjunct mics open simultaneously.

It's usually a batch fault with the discs themselves, rather than the recorder, HtoHe: try a disc from another manufacturer if possible, just to see if the noise is reduplicated: I'm expecting that it won't be.