‘It was like 26-dimensional chess’: Roger Wright on managing the Proms

It sounds like a dream job — being in charge of what is now regarded as the greatest classical music festival in the world. But most of us would quail at the challenge. Quite apart from needing enough musical imagination to come up with 75 nightly programmes, it must surely be a logistical nightmare, corralling 300 musical artists and 315 works into a two-month season? Roger Wright, director of the BBC Proms since 2008 (as well as Controller of BBC Radio 3), obviously relishes the task.

‘I don’t do sitting in the chair dreaming about what we might put on,’ says Wright. ‘Nor is every single thing my personal choice.’ Yet throughout this year’s programme there are dozens of what’s become the trademark Wright Concert: unlikely combinations of composers and performers, guaranteed to provoke but also tantalise.

How do you, and your concerts team, begin work? With a blank sheet of paper? Or a set of ideas? A preconceived plan?

‘There’s never a blank sheet,’ says Wright. ‘I can tell you what’s happening every night in 2014. I can tell you who will be performing most nights in 2015. And I can tell you some of the dates we’ve got booked for the big international orchestras in 2016.’ Wright works to a three-year schedule, ‘spinning plates in the air’ until that dread moment in late January when the Proms programme has to go to press and no more drastic changes can be made.

‘As more and more dates get filled in, the shape begins to emerge and you can be more directive,’ says Wright. Take, for instance, this year’s Polish theme, provoked by the centenary of Witold Lutoslawski’s birth in Warsaw in January 1913. ‘We didn’t set out for 2013 to have a Polish thread,’ Wright explains.