It is inevitable that a festival the size of the Proms should become a showcase not just for the artists taking part, but also for the way classical music is perceived more generally. There would be no point in a public services’ provider such as the BBC launching such an enterprise every year if it didn’t deliver what people wanted. And indeed it is clear that it matters very much to the BBC how many people do actually attend these concerts: the blurb is as full as ever of figures showing how last year was a ‘record-breaking’ year; and now how this year there were ‘376 tickets sold every minute during the first hour of BBC Proms booking’. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
There has been a trend over recent years towards preferring what is new and shiny — young people, recent repertoire, media personalities. One notices, for example, that the presenters on TV and radio are given as much hype in the publicity as the people who are actually giving the concerts. The soloists in the many concertos on display this year seem by and large to be young people who scrub up well in their photographs. And the amount of new music is staggering: 11 new commissions from ‘living composers’ (as the press pack intriguingly has it); and 26 premières.
The number of hip, user-friendly concerts is growing. We have become used to Blue Peter and other Family Proms where the audience can join in, but this year there is a move towards the funny and even wacky: ‘Classical music meets comedy at the Proms for the first time with an evening hosted by comedian and pianist Tim Minchin’ (13 August); ‘Free Family Prom as Proms collaborates with CBBC’s Horrible Histories for the first time’ (30 July); ‘First Audience Choice Prom’ (2 September) — where the audience can choose what music they listen to, though how the librarians are going to provide enough music for that to work has yet to be seen. There will also be a Human Planet Prom (23 and 24 July), introduced by John Hurt from the BBC 1 television series; and a film music night (Spaghetti Western Orchestra, 12 August).
I’m intrigued. Since the number of Prom events has not significantly increased in the past 20 years, what has been left out to accommodate these new things? The standard repertory looks at first sight just as ample and varied as usual. The big orchestras are there again, playing ever more exotic corners of the repertoire — how about Havergal Brian’s colossal ‘Gothic’ symphony on 17 July? To include all of Brahms’s symphonies and concertos should mollify any hard-core traditionalist, yet somewhere the numbers simply don’t add up.
I did a count of the number of pieces being performed this year: there are 257. Fair enough, that sounds normal, but what brought me up short was that only 21 of them were written before 1811. This is all the more remarkable when one remembers that the pre-1811 category includes Bach, Handel, Mozart and Haydn (who is not there at all this year), as well as every early baroque and renaissance composer. I then went on to count how many of the remaining 236 pieces were written after 1911, and the answer is about 158. So well over half the entire corpus of music to be heard this year at the Proms was written in the past 100 years — and much of that very recently indeed.
Not long ago this kind of planning would have been thought little short of suicidal. I wonder what has changed. My guess is that these days older music is thought to be played by older people. Thirty years ago the impression was the reverse, but the early music revolutionaries have grown older and the scene has moved on: there is a sense that old music of any kind is ‘beardy’. This is where the photographs come in. Concerts these days need to appear to be cutting-edge. Photogenic young talents making their debut are box-office gold dust. They can play what they like and they don’t seem to be choosing Vivaldi any more. Contemporary and virtuosic is the formula of the moment.
If you were expecting a rant from an early music specialist about all this, you are going to be disappointed. More could have been done with Victoria’s anniversary, certainly — he was a far greater composer than Liszt — but Liszt was the more recent. It would have been good at least to have had a Proms feature talk about Victoria; but in the end I like modern music and I want the Proms to survive. I hope Roger Wright and his colleagues have once again judged the mood correctly. I believe they have.
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