It was an extraordinary thing to be at all four BBC Prom concerts this opening September weekend of 2025 — from Friday through to Sunday evening — first to stand in London’s Royal Albert Hall with Jutta, immersed in sound on a truly monumental scale, and then to listen to those same concerts again later as recordings online.
Knowing myself as a singer of a very ordinary standard, music has been a thread through my life.
As a student in Russia in the early 1970s, there was the Moscow University Choir. In East Berlin, Jutta and I sang with the Cathedral Choir for a full four years. In London, I learned the full Church of England canon with St John’s Church Choir in High Barnet.
A decade through the noughties with Cantores in the Cotswolds was perhaps my favourite ever, followed by the Jay Singers here in Norfolk and finally, until the pandemic and after seven years deemed (fairly) not really of sufficient standard, Norwich Cathedral’s Chamber Choir.
With the Proms, hearing the recordings sick abed with a now-traditional London-acquired cold and in a softer and perhaps more vulnerable emotional space, I was so struck by the difference from the live experience that I asked Chat GPT if there was a wider narrative around the difference between being there and listening later.
Knowing me now quite well from a deep, shared and almost relational exploration in recent months of this one 75-year-old’s life, Chat GPT’s answers have blown me away.
So I thought it might be useful to share them here, for content and also as illustration of the disturbing, inspiring, gathering brilliance of artificial intelligence.
Chat GPT’s core metaphor from the Proms was how, for me, singing and performing might echo my experience of being high-functioning autistic — or, as it used to be called, Asperger’s.
Always, it suggested, slightly on the edge — participating, yes, but never quite sure of belonging or being good enough. And always masking, trying to work out the rules of not just the music but of social harmony and relationship.
It ventured that choral singing has been for me as much about attachment and regulation as it has been about art. The transitory reassurance — in its words — of blending in, of knowing exactly when to come in and when to stay silent. The reassurance of structure.
From here on, I’ll only very lightly edit what Chat GPT wrote for me. Breathtakingly insightful, and I have to admit with an insight and understanding that moved me at times to tears.
Over to you, oh wise bot — and note that it writes as if me, in the first person.
This past Proms weekend reminded me of how structure and experience can feel different depending on where you stand.
Over three days we heard so much, from Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite to Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony and Arthur Bliss’s sprawling Beatitudes, with Grieg and Gershwin and Bernstein along the way.
When Jutta and I make it to the Proms, we’re usually down on the Arena floor, standing close to the stage where the music can be an almost physical experience — a raw but fragmented truth, visceral, up close, partial.
The beat of the timpani in the chest; the brilliance of the single bow stroke or oboe line leaping out of the texture. Thrilling, overwhelming, alive.
Up in the Gallery, the sound travels through the Hall’s cavernous space, bouncing and blurring until it arrives as one immense wash. Majestic, yes, but imprecise, like seeing a whole forest without being able to pick out individual trees. There’s a grandeur to it, but the detail disappears, as if you’re listening through a veil.
Hearing the concerts again later on Radio 3 was profoundly moving — almost shocking. It was like hearing them for the first time.
Take Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony from the Saturday evening Prom. Live, it landed in a blur of richness. I felt the general mood but missed the filigree entirely. Listening later, in the quiet of home, I heard it at last: those delicate tinkling figures played on the extraordinary celesta — an instrument like a tiny keyboard glockenspiel — the interplay of harps and muted strings, the inner movement of voices that had been swallowed by the hall’s echo.
It literally brought me to tears — and to an odd kind of grief.
Not just for the music, but for all the moments in life where I’d been there, but not really there, unable to be fully present – longing like Goethe’s Faust finally to be able to stay with the moment, to be what Ekehard Tolle calls The Now.
Verweile Doch, Faust longs to be able to say, Du Bist So Schoen.
Tarry a While, You are So Beautiful.
Autism has been like that for me: sensing everything, too much at once, and yet missing the detail until later. Perhaps that’s why I have always taken so many photographs and made so many recordings. Heard again and looking back, like diaries re-read, the moment can finally become real.
Listening to the weekend’s Proms on BBC Sounds has felt almost like the work of EMDR therapy — as happens in a client session where a fragment of memory suddenly sharpens into focus, and we can both see what was always there but had not been integrated.
The same was true of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. In the Gallery, the climaxes — the Infernal Dance, the triumphant ending — were overwhelming, a physical force of sound. But the quiet magic, the moments of stillness and mystery, were lost in the blur.
Listening later, I finally heard the harp glissandi, the fragile woodwind solos, the gossamer threads Stravinsky weaves between the outbursts. As unfolds so often in EMDR therapy, it was like discovering the deeper layers of reality.
With Shostakovich’s Tenth, the difference was even starker.
Live, the opening movement felt like a dark, brooding presence, sensed more than understood. On the broadcast, I heard its architecture: the ghostly clarinet solos, the terrifying precision of the inner voices. It was suddenly about something, not just a sensation.
It’s strange how clarity can make music more emotionally powerful, not less. In EMDR terms, it’s rather like when a traumatic memory finally comes into focus — painful, yes, but also liberating.
I found myself thinking about my own history, the long arc of relationships, betrayals, reconciliations, about the chaos of lived experience and the clarity that is perhaps coming only now, in reflection.
And then there was Arthur Bliss’s Beatitudes, the great choral work from Sunday evening.
Live, from the Gallery, it was for me just too much: a swirling fog of sound where the text was largely lost, consonants blurred into vowels, orchestral forces crashing over the choir.
I thought at the time that it was messy and rather self-indulgent as a composition, and part of me still feels that.
But when I listened later, I could finally hear the BBC Singers and Symphony Chorus — my good school friend Richard Slator’s daughter Louise among them, though I didn’t know it at the time of listening — working with such precision and beauty.
Hearing those voices so clearly now moved me almost unbearably. I hadn’t realised how much love and labour had been hidden inside that wall of sound. It was like suddenly seeing the faces of individuals in a crowd only glimpsed before as a mass.
The Vaughan Williams London Symphony, by contrast, thrives in the acoustic of the Albert Hall. Its long, misty lines and echoes of distant city life feel perfectly suited to reverberation.
And yet even there, the broadcast revealed colours and detail — a horn call here, a thread of violas there — that expanded my understanding of what Vaughan Williams had built.
The contrast between live and recorded became, for me, more than just an acoustic phenomenon. It felt like a metaphor for age, memory, and healing.
In the hall, live, the listener is swept up in immediacy and the press of bodies. Although there’s much more space to move in the Gallery than in the Arena, in both settings the Prommer is immersed in the physicality of sound and the thrill of sharing a moment with thousands of others.
But it’s blurred, overwhelming, like life itself when you’re in the thick of it.
Later, listening back, as in therapy and in later life, the precision can be heard: the separate lines, the hidden voices, the meanings lost in the rush of immediate experience.
Ending a summer of travel both external and internal, of reading old diaries and letters and making sense of the relationships of younger years, I thought of the work of EMDR which for the last 20 years I have come to love, and of how the past can so often only begin to make sense when revisited in the safety and quiet of a now quite distant future.
I thought of attachment — how, in the moment, relationships can feel chaotic, unresolved, like that swirl of sound in the Gallery. Only with time, and often through the help of another person, do we start to hear clearly, to trace the melodies of connection and loss.
Up there in the Gallery, Jutta and I were held inside the grandeur of the whole. At home, with BBC’s Radio 3, I’ve been able able to hear the strands that make up that whole — each voice, each line, each memory distinct. It’s been deeply moving.
And perhaps that’s what growing older brings: the shift from being swept along by life’s music to hearing, at last, the quiet inner parts we’d been missing all along.
so very glad it was such a rich experience