Katherine Jenkins - Gatcombe Park

Monday 29th June 2009

Union Jacks were waving. The Pimms was being poured. Wicker hampers spilled open and music-lovers lounged  on picnic rugs as the National Symphony Orchestra played out its soaring scores.
It’s hard to imagine a setting more quintessentially English setting than Gatcombe Park, but soprano Katherine Jenkins, with the Welsh flag flying, made Saturday’s Last Night Of The Proms a perfectly British affair.
In glorious sunshine, they came in their thousands to the sell-out concert – 8,200 fans had descended on Princess Anne’s estate, where Katherine let slip she’d had tea with the Princess Royal earlier in the afternoon.
In gorgeous emerald green, she sang the haunting strains of Amazing Grace before upping the tempo with Cinema Paradiso.
Then a great hush descended as a perfectly executed Laudate Dominum drifted over the parkland.
Katherine had asked for audience questions in the interval. Written on napkins, paper plates and scraps of paper, she burst out laughing as she began to read.
“Have you ever dated a Welsh rugby player? “ asked one man, sitting in front of us. She giggled.
“Could you say hello to my husband, he’s been stuck in the car park for four hours waiting for the AA?” another pleaded. So Katherine shouted to him to check all was well, then blew a kiss.
Refreshingly down-to-earth, sweet, deliciously funny, she has a voice like liquid gold.
In a perfectly pink bejewelled gown, she started her second set with a heart-stopping arrangement of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Music of the Night, from Phantom of the Opera, came next, then Nessun Dorma.
“I know it’s a man’s song,” she asked, winking, as her orchestra struck up the first bars of the Phantom classic.
“But why should the men get all the good songs?”
Giggling, she brought her classical supergroup support act, All Angels, back to the stage while she changed “into another frock”.
Then came Katherine’s finale, the proper flag-waving, patriotic stuff that is the  Last Night of the Proms.
Up to the stage came a family friend, to help with the conducting. He was just nine.
It was surely the biggest night of his life, in the biggest jacket of his life –  he’d borrowed conductor Anthony Inglis’s tux. And the crowd loved it.
Union Jacks in hand, wine glasses aloft and singing for all their lungs were worth, it seemed as if all 8,200 were on their feet for Rule Brittannia and a stirring Jerusalem.
And Elgar himself would surely have heard Land Of Hope and Glory from his resting place, over the hills in Malvern. We’ll Meet Again finished an extraordinary night all too soon.

Tanya Gledhill