This year's entire Proms season may have had a Spanish flavour, but I doubt that there was any other concert where the conductor - the ever ebullient Rumon Gamba - turned up dressed as if to do battle with a bull rather than an orchestra, and where the bust of Proms' founder Sir Henry Wood sported a sombrero. The annual Blue Peter Prom is in a class of its own, not least because large parts of the young audience are refreshingly ignorant of concert hall etiquette and respond accordingly. They love the bits where they can join in, so the world premiere of Damien Harron's Carnival of Rhythms went down a storm, and they like something to look at, so Paco Pena's red hot Flamenco, with (from a grown-up point of view) two unsettlingly smouldering dancers, was a huge success.
The event never quite escapes the feeling, however, of a dose of cultural medicine being dished out to offspring by the kind of parents who think Blue Peter is acceptable TV. You could see this was serious because Liz Barker had her hair scraped back in the severest of buns. But judging by the number of tots in the audience who played air violin along with 14-year-old Chloe Hanslip's explosive excerpts from Franz Waxman's Carmen Fantasie, this audience has a fair few prodigies in the making.
One might regret the lack of real fireworks (we had to make do with balloons) in a programme entitled Fiesta, but the sense of fun and the popular nature of much of the music - Bizet's March of the Toreadors, Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat and Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven - meant that the BBC Philharmonic never underplayed in any sense. There were some very fine moments including a fully unleashed Danza Criolla by Piazzolla, that so put us in the mood that my accompanying seven-year-olds practised their tango all the way down street afterwards.
In the end, that is what this afternoon is all about, reminding its young audience that there are many different kinds of music, and that Piazzolla and Franz Waxman can make you feel as happy and jiggly inside as Atomic Kitten and Gareth Gates.
