Tom Service on the Royal Albert Hall

'My love affair with classical music's moshpit'
Unbeatable … the last night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Acoustics are a rich and strange thing. Very knowledgeable acousticians can tell you all about reverberation times, frequency ranges and the sonic absorption rates of multi-planed surfaces (I may have made that last one up). But for all the science, the way a hall sounds eventually boils down to something much simpler: does it work or doesn't it?

In Britain, there are famously few places that qualify as having great acoustics for an orchestra. The Usher Hall in Edinburgh is one of them, the Royal Albert Hall in London is not. In the Usher Hall, a sort of Albert Hall in miniature, you are slapped in the ears with the immediacy and force of the sound. Even from the back row, the Cleveland Orchestra seem as vivid and as loud as if they were in your front room. But in the gigantic maw of the Royal Albert Hall, the home of the BBC Proms, it feels as if the musicians are playing in the next room – possibly the next borough.

Acoustics are not the same thing as atmosphere. If the live experience were just about the way things sounded, the only places really worth hearing an orchestra would be the Musikverein in Vienna and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. And yet for my money, the best place to experience an orchestral concert in this country, and quite possibly the world, is the Royal Albert Hall. Contradictory? Not really: a space is not defined by the science of how it sounds, but by its audience, by their quality of listening and attention. Orchestral musicians might resent the Royal Albert Hall's sonic limitations, but they all love the audience. The Musikverein is stuffed with expensive hairdos and designer labels, and the Usher Hall observes a sort of decorous respectability. But only the Albert Hall, during the Proms, has this audience of punters who pay their £5 to stand in classical music's most famous moshpit, night after night, for the simple reason that they want to hear the music they love. It might be a basket case in terms of its physical properties. But atmospherically, the Royal Albert Hall is unbeatable.