May 11, 2019

Łańcut, Poland

It was quite fun working out the keyboard shortcuts for both of the diacritics in the name of this wonderful Polish city. We're performing in Łańcut Castle tonight and tomorrow afternoon, before flying back home tomorrow night. We only arrived at 10pm last night, so it's a compact trip. Just enough time to eat some hearty Polish soup.

This morning I faced one of the year's most nerve-wracking tasks: booking my tickets to the 2019 BBC Proms. Tickets went on sale at 9am BST this morning, and when I finally managed to access the homepage at 10:04am Polish time, I found myself 12,912th in the queue. Thankfully lots of punters can use the website at the same time, so I eventually had all my seats booked by around 11:45am, after routinely checking my place in the queue every three minutes or so for over an hour.

Now that my tickets are booked (and I have seats for everything I wanted to see, thank goodness), I can look forward to my Summer concert calendar in peace. One thing I will tell you is that it's busy (particularly as we have our own concert calendar sandwiched in between). But who am I most looking forward to seeing? Yuja Wang? Leonidas Kavakos and the Vienna Philharmonic? Our friends in Tenebrae and Voces8? Nora Fischer? Sarah Connolly? Public Service Broadcasting and The Multi-Storey Orchestra? Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the CBSO and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (some more diacritics for you)? The list is seemingly endless. But I think the winner has to be Prom 70, fronted by Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead. Not only is the music right up my street (with snippets by Steve Reich and Penderecki thrown in for good measure), but my good friend from university, Hugh Brunt, is conducting the whole thing. Get yourself a ticket, if you can. I know I'll be bawling with pride throughout.

After that marathon stint of sitting in front of my computer, I now need to go and stretch my legs. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and that you also book some tickets, if you're going to find yourself in London between July and September.