The Last Night of the Proms was held last weekend in London of course but Poland too has its share of the Proms tradition, with a replica of the Last Night staged in Krakow on Saturday.

Michał Kubicki reports

The Proms Festival is an inseparable part of the British music tradition. The Last Night is absolutely unique, with its splendour and revelry to the strains of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory. The Polish Proms tradition is only 13 years old. Every September a replica of the Last Night in London is held in Krakow.

Originally an event dedicated to the city’s sizeable British community, it has developed into a  meeting of music lovers and the international business community.

Tomorrow’s concert of the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra from Katowice and the Polish Radio Choir of Krakow is conducted by Mark Fitzgerald: ‘The Proms is a London-based event; they are now trying to include the regions much more which means a lot of our beautiful tradition we now don’t hear enough. But we do it in Poland, exactly what the traditional version is, particularly including  Henry Wood’s Sea-Songs which we didn’t hear at the Royal Albert Hall last week.’
 
The repertoire of Last Night of the Proms in Krakow also includes a selection of operatic arias, the world premiere of the new version of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto and, of course, Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, Rule Britannia and Jerusalem.
It is not Mark Fitzgerald’s first time in Krakow: ‘It’s a magnificent feeling. The sight in the hall is absolutely extraordinary. There’s a group of wild English people, some of them in kilts and traditional British outfit, and of course our lovely Polish audience and everybody joins in.  Polish people who haven’t been to the concert before get quite alarmed at the amount of participation which the audience is able to have, especially in the final part of the concert but the serious bits they listen to with great attention and silence.’
 
The honorary committee of the Last Night of the Proms in Krakow includes the British Ambassador to Poland Ric Todd, Poland’s last president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski and the prominent historian Norman Davies.