The official guide to this summer’s Proms, which began last night, is 170 pages long and needs a guide itself to negotiate, so here goes. Ahead of the Last Night on 10 September are 88 concerts, mostly at the Royal Albert Hall, which in this Shakespearean season one might call the Kensington O, much as The Globe Theatre was “the wooden O” in Henry V.

Both venues have the same feature – the standing-room-only arena in front of the stage. This makes the promenaders the groundlings that they are, paying the least and foregoing a seat, but occupying the best position in the house.
Shakespeare appears regularly through the season but nowhere more prominently than in Prom 20 (30 July) when Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts a performance of Hector Berlioz’s 1839 “symphonie dramatique” Romeo and Juliet, a mighty choral work two hours in length, glorious in its transformation of suicidal Elizabethan love into the full-blown Romantic passion of the nineteenth century, the same size ratio as The Globe to the Albert Hall.

Two choruses, singing in French, are needed to fill the lofty space – Gardiner’s own professional Monteverdi Choir and the National Youth Choir of Scotland, the latter best among the United Kingdom’s teenage singing ensembles. Much of the drama, however, is rendered wordlessly by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, founded by Gardiner to play stylistically on instruments of the Napoleonic era in which Berlioz was born.