They Toll For Thee

Bells call people to pray, to mourn, to marry. They pass them news of war, peace, fire, and flood. On a sweltering August afternoon in London, they summoned me to the Royal Albert Hall. That night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from The Hallé at the BBC Proms was partly special because it was Kachun Wong’s London debut as their new Principal Conductor. But its impact was heightened, as Alexandra Coghlan wrote in The Tablet, by “real church bells placed high in the gallery, drawn into answering peal by the sheer momentum of the music-making.”