Nitin Sawhney’s Prom last night

Very good! It was good to talk to Mary and find out what they'd been up to in France, and we were lucky to get in. There was an absolutely enormous queue, something like 1500 people long, which seemed to have been forming since about six o'clock for a nine o'clock performance. A very wide range of guests, and Natacha Atlas showing off her flamenco singing skills. I was a little disappointed that Sidi Labh Cherkaoui and Akram Khan didn't do any dance, but their physical theater about a man getting through an Indian(?) train station was pretty mesmerizing. The only really Western orchestral music going on was when he and the orchestra played music that he'd scored for the new game 'Heavenly Sword' - the rest was often more Indian than Western. Anoushka Shankar was excellent on the sitar, although I couldn't see her when she sat down. Her sitar itself looked interesting, definitely the result of a Western design aesthetic rather than an Indian one. It looked like something off the cover of one of John Meaney's books - blue and white and vaguely organic. Standout for me, though, was when Imogen Heap came on. She wasn't more technically skilled than the others, but she inhabited the music and pushed these gorgeous rolling multi-layered beat sequences forward. We weren't sure if she was looping her own voice or not, but whatever it was, I'd have liked more than one track! Huge applause at the end, and entirely merited.