The Royal Albert Hall, in London, from its brick-and-terra-cotta façade to the velvet seats and gilded boxes within, is a great bowl of red and gold. Replete with Empire, the concert hall, built in 1871, was designed to showcase the talent and wealth that flowed to the capital, and which Britain, gracious in dominion, reflected. Enlightenment and power came hand in hand—at least in theory.

Those ideals, however delusional, still echo more than fourteen decades later. Throughout the summer, the Hall hosts the BBC Proms, a series which modestly bills itself as the “world’s greatest classical music festival.” Seventy-five concerts, at least one a day for two months, draw some of the globe’s greatest musicians and ensembles to the city, where they often play to sold-out crowds.

High musical values are a given, but, at the Proms, much of the appeal lies in low ticket prices: the most expensive seats go for a hundred pounds, while six-pound day tickets—obtained online, or by waiting in an orderly, hours-long queue—allow enthusiasts to “promenade,” or stand, in the central arena, directly in front of the stage. The publicly funded BBC, which broadcasts every concert, picks up the tab, contributing around ten million pounds as part of its remit to “inform, educate and entertain.” (It recoups about half of that from ticket sales.) The budget’s relative scantiness is as remarkable as its mere existence. There are some important differences, but imagine if PBS were to pay half of the New York Philharmonic’s season budget and sell the best seats at eight dollars apiece.

One recent evening, the audience roared as the pianist Paul Lewis walked onstage to join the BBC Philharmonic, one of five orchestras run by the broadcaster. Lewis bowed and sat down at the gleaming Steinway, and the sound of a large crowd being very quiet gave way to the liquid phrases of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto. Prommers filled the arena, the front row close enough to study every move of the pianist’s fingers. Many had queued for hours, but Emily Righini-Nisbet, a twenty-three-year-old civil servant who also plays the viola (“Just for fun,” she said), had cycled straight from her office, in Westminster. She had decided to come “on the spur of the moment,” and, though it was only her third Prom, she appreciated the low barrier to entry. In London, she said, “You can’t really go to many other places that cost six pounds.”

Linda West, a lay preacher and amateur choral singer, has attended Proms each year for the past five decades. Her first—“quite memorable”—was the opening night of 1968; in 1981, she met her husband, Roger, in front of the fountain that used to adorn the center of the arena (it had goldfish). In younger days, West remembered, “We used to go to the Prom every night, then down to the pub afterwards, and somehow still manage to get up for work the next day.” Since then, she and Roger have retired and moved outside of London, but they still planned to attend a dozen or so concerts of this season’s concerts. “It’s one of the great British institutions,” West said. “It really is.”

West was looking forward to the Last Night of the Proms, the annual celebration that caps the series, which will be led this year by her favorite conductor, Sir Andrew Davis. Amid the metropolitan spectacle of an international music festival, it’s strange that this culminating event, one of the Corporation’s most prominent, is perhaps its most parochial. The concert, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, proudly fosters the British fondness for tradition, be it silly or solemn. A radio and television audience in the millions watches around six thousand punters, many in evening dress, bob in time to sea shanties orchestrated by the Proms’ founding conductor, Henry Wood; whistle along to the tune of “Judas Maccabaeus”; and sing patriotic songs (“Jerusalem,” “God Save the Queen”) with gusto. Union Jacks wave, punctuated by the occasional emigré Stars and Stripes or Tricolor, and by a smattering of oversized bicycle horns, clown wigs, and inflatable bananas. The grand space swells with a feeling somewhere between the patriotic fervor of a royal wedding and the convivial chatter of a village fête.

For the past two years, though, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has soured the mood. To speak of “the elephant in the room,” as one critic did in 2017, has seemed insufficient for the building’s scale. Brexit has drowned all other subjects and flooded the arena with an oppositional tide of gold-and-blue E.U. flags. Western classical music is Eurocentric, but last year’s program felt pointedly Continental: the Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo led a program that celebrated the centenary of his country’s independence from Russia, and which included masterpieces by Wagner (a German) and Kodály (a Hungarian), as well as the normal chestnuts. Music that previously seemed mainly anachronistic—“Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves”—took on a bitter edge. Nigel Farage, a nationalist politician, complained that the concert was supposed to be “a celebration of Britishness,” and pro-Brexit groups demanded that E.U. flags be banned. The BBC, nonpartisan by law, responded that, while it expected “a wide variety of flags,” it considered the night to be “a music platform, not a political one.” Like Farage, the BBC seemed to be living in an imaginary past in which we had all agreed that flag-waving and national-anthem-singing were nonpolitical acts.

Since the Brexit vote, it has been far harder to see such displays as harmless. They’re certainly no longer neutral. More than two years have gone by, and Brexit feels less oceanic but no less ubiquitous. The dull persistence of the negotiations with the E.U. and the political deadlock in Parliament form an oppressive thrum that pervades British cultural and political life. Brexit, it seems, is the only subject worth talking about, but talking about it is exhausting.

This year’s edition of the Last Night, on September 8th, exhibits that exhaustion. The concert caps a season that welcomed pianists from China, South Korea, and Georgia; an orchestra of Israelis and Palestinians; Russian and American conductors; sopranos from Romania, Nigeria, France, Lithuania, and Ireland; and a great range of performers from around the United Kingdom. In startling contrast, six of the nine composers featured on the Last Night are long-dead Englishmen, residue from the age of Empire. The program feels wilfully old-fashioned—while we wait for answers, retreating into Victoriana must have seemed, to BBC programmers, like the easiest course.

The only female (and only living) composer included is Roxanna Panufnik, who was born in Britain, to a Polish-immigrant father. Panufnik recently applied for Polish citizenship, and her piece (a BBC commission called “Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light,” which sets to music words by Khalil Gibran and the First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg) seems destined to be interpreted through the lens of Brexit. But the most poignant moment, in a concert that prescribes the old and pleasant as an antidote to the new and nasty, may come right at the end, when the Last Night concludes with a rendition of the traditional parting song “Auld Lang Syne.” It poses a question that is as urgent as it will ever be: Should old acquaintance be forgot?