May 15, 16, O’Neill’s Pub, Royal Albert Hall Concert

 

    We had to return to O’Neill’s Irish Pub for a traditional English Fish & Chips pretheater meal! The portions are huge. Fish, french fries and “mushy peas.”

In an earlier post we talked about visiting Royal Albert Hall, one of the world’s premier entertainment venues. It is to London what Carnegie Hall is to New York. Opened in 1871, it was the dream of Prince Albert, the wife of Queen Victoria. He loved the arts and wanted a venue for the performing arts. He did not live to see its completion, but Queen Victoria made certain that the theater was completed and named for her beloved husband, Albert. There is a large monument to Prince Albert in Hyde Park across the street from the theater. It is amazing that a building built in 1871 is still serving its purpose today. One downside of that however is that the building was built before air conditioning and it still does not have a/c today. Imagine the heat in the summer with 4,500 people inside. They can open the windows which the do before the concert and at intermission, but it does not cool down the auditorium. The windows are always closed during a concert. They do not want to ruin the appearance of the Hall by adding a/c duct work and there is no place around the building to put the compressors anyhow. Interestingly, we were not allowed to photograph the interior on the tour, but we got some great photographs tonight. Actually we got better pictures because the theater was lit for the performance.

We wanted to make sure that we saw something in this theater and chose to see the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra play a concert called “Movie Gala.” They do the concert once a year and play theme tunes from famous movies. They play the entire orchestral piece, not just the snippet most people remember from the movie. For example, there is a great deal more to the “Rocky” theme than just the part you remember from him running up the steps in the movie. Among the themes played was: Star Wars, Rocky, Titanic, Theme from Peter Gunn, Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pirates of the Caribbean, Superman, The Deer Hunter, Gladiator, and Harry Potter among others I cannot remember at the moment. The concert lasted two and one half hours! We really got our money’s worth and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I am not sure how good a musician you have to be to play with this orchestra, but I would guess that it is probably easier to play in the NBA.

The beautiful interior of the Royal Albert Hall.

   The theater has a glass dome that is not attached to the building merely sitting on top. When the theater was opened, it had very bad acoustic problems because of the echo caused by the glass dome. Some Dutch engineers solved the problem (although not entirely we noticed) by suspending some upside down mushrooms from the ceiling. The colors, blue in this picture, change throughout the performance.

    View from our box seats. We were very lucky. This box is actually owned by someone on a 999 year lease. When the owners decide not to attend a concert, they return the tickets and they are sold for charity. We got seats on the front row of the box just opposite the Queen’s box and the box owned by the Spencer Family (Princess Diana’s family). Excellent seats. In the boxes you are allowed to bring in drinks and can even get wine and champagne chilled in an ice bucket that you can set on the serving table at the back of the box.

   The light at the top of the box just across from us is in the Queen’s box. It is lighted red when the Queen is in attendance. From the Queen’s private sitting room there is a buzzer that will announce to the orchestra when the Queen is entering her box so that they can begin playing “God Save the Queen.”

  Don’t we look happy?

The two following shots are from the Queen’s box. Not sure who was in her box that night.

           

An illegal photo taken by Elaine during the performance. There was to be no photography or recording during the concert, but of course Elaine had to violate the rule. However, she was not bad. A gentleman in the adjacent box recorded the entire concert on his iPad.

Raw Brick is a nice casual Italian restaurant in our neighborhood where we have eaten several times. This light fixture appears to be bubbles falling out of it.