Joy as Proms audience joins in Beethoven’s Ode to the Ukulele

Jack Malvern

When Beethoven wrote his heaven-storming Ninth Symphony he cannot have imagined that the Ode to Joy would one day be played by an ensemble of 1,000 ukuleles. The attempt at the Albert Hall on Tuesday night was as sublime as it was ridiculous.

The band, which has been going for almost 25 years, hoped to attract about 200 players. In the event, the gathering surpassed the world record for largest ukulele ensemble, set at the London Ukulele Festival on June 20, but will not enter the record books because the actual number of players could not be verified. So full was the sold-out hall that room could not be found for the people who would count the number of players.

The Times played its part by assigning a reporter who had spent a month trying to get to grips with the instrument — and attended the mass rehearsal in which the audience were invited to participate.

The resulting performance was surprisingly quiet. The ukulele, invented a century after Beethoven’s death, is such a gentle instrument that even a 1,000 players failed to drown out the amplified instruments on the stage. A confident start gave way to a quieter period as players lost their bearings a few bars into the tune and had to wait for a familiar moment to begin again. The Times correspondent was foiled by the tricky B minor chord, and spent much of the rest of the time playing D when he should have been playing A, and vice versa. An orchestra member helpfully waved from the stage each time the theme resumed, and by the final recapitulation most had gained the confidence to strum harder.

As the final chord of the crescendo rang through the auditorium, the audience roared their approval and players held their instruments aloft in triumph.

George Hinchliffe, the orchestra’s musical director, remarked that the BBC estimated 1,000 people had joined in with the eight-person professional ensemble. “That was, of course, the setting of a fragment of Beethoven to 1,008 ukuleles,” he said.

Roger Wright, Controller of BBC Radio 3, had learnt the ukulele especially for the concert, and played the melody while two of his children played the chords. “I’m a cello and piano player, so the notion of plucked instruments was not at all in my repertoire,” he told The Times. “I played the tune because my arthritic fingers gave me such agony I couldn’t play the chords.”

Verity Sharp, the BBC Radio 3 presenter who introduced the late-night Prom, also joined in by playing the melody. “When we did the rehearsal, I was surprised at how soft it was. I thought that 1,000 of anything would be a racket, but they’re such small, soft instruments. It was really soft, gentle and sweet.”

As the concert drew to a close, the band politely demonstrated the similarity of pop tunes with a medley that dissolved into Hey Jude. As they did so, the audience lifted their ukuleles, filling the auditorium with a happily swaying mass of the instruments. Surely Sir Henry Wood, the founder of the Proms, whose bust observed proceedings, would have approved.