Critics of this year’s festival have missed the point, Roger Wright tells Kate Chisholm
Where’s the meat, the main course, the epic single masterwork? asked some of the music critics after the First Night of the Proms. They’ve missed the point, says Roger Wright, director of the Proms since 2008, in defence of his evening of Stravinsky, Chabrier, Tchaikovsky, Poulenc, Elgar, Brahms and Bruckner. The critics complained that a concert of seven works, with two intervals interrupting the flow, was not what they expected of arguably the world’s greatest classical music festival. They wanted a roof-raising performance of Verdi’s Requiem or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. But actually the musical taster devised by Wright felt very true to the Proms’ original mission as devised by their founder Robert Newman in 1895.
The Victorian impresario, with the financial backing of a London throat surgeon, wanted as wide an audience as possible to enjoy ‘serious music’. His idea was to put on a series of nightly concerts, ‘to train the public by easy stages…gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music’. He hoped to attract a different audience by selling tickets for just a shilling and creating a more informal atmosphere: eating, drinking and smoking during the concert were all encouraged.
In those early seasons, if you went to every concert you would have emerged in September slightly dazed but having had a complete education in the classical canon, explains Ivan Hewett, music critic of the Daily Telegraph and a historian of the Proms. Mondays were always devoted to Wagner, if it was Wednesday you knew you would get something from Bach or Brahms, and by Friday you were ready for a dose of Beethoven. But there was always also a modernising zeal to the Proms programmes. As far back as 1912, Henry Wood was inflicting Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra on the Prommers. They hissed their disapproval. Undeterred, the following year Wood invited Schoenberg himself to come and conduct the work.
What’s so intriguing about the Proms is their incredible resilience as a cultural institution. No matter how much you try to innovate, change, adapt (this year we have Goldie, the drum’n’bass impresario, composing a work for the ‘Evolution’ Prom and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead opening the night on Friday 14 August with his Popcorn Superhet Receive), the core values established by Newman and his chief conductor, Henry Wood, survive triumphantly.
In a single week in August you can still hear the Eroica, a Mendelssohn violin concerto, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto. But alongside them you’ll also hear Heinz Holliger, Oliver Knussen, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (whose new works were once greeted by walk-outs and boos) and a new BBC commission from Michael Jarrell — and these are all scheduled for the main evening concert in the Albert Hall. The Proms audience is always being gently nudged along in the direction of new music, new ideas, new sounds.
How, though, does the Proms director set about devising a season of 100 concerts in eight weeks that will engage the audience, tease those irascible critics and satisfy the demands of the Select Committee on culture, media and sport? (Since 1927 the BBC has run the Proms, ensuring their survival through the chaos of depression and war. Nowadays the season receives a £6 million subsidy from the licence fee.)
It’s not the work of one person, says Wright. Other people — performers, composers, concert-goers — are suggesting things all the time. The programmes develop organically. Something emerges that then provides the trigger for performing, say, all the Stravinsky ballets in a single season or putting on a ‘Multiple Pianos Day’, celebrating all the works written for more than one piano. This year the Proms opened with the Russian composer’s Fireworks because of its fizz, its flair, but also because it was the work that inspired Diaghilev to commission Stravinsky to write ballets for his Ballets Russes company. Without Fireworks we would not have had The Rite of Spring or Pulcinella.
On the Last Night, the evening begins with Oliver Knussen’s Flourish with Fireworks. ‘It’s part of the thinking behind the programming,’ says Wright. ‘What are the musical stories here?’ he asks, posing the question rather than providing the answer. ‘The whole spirit of the Proms is to enjoy the music you know and then be taken a bit further by the programming.’
Wright enjoys provoking a debate. ‘Concerts have become rather formulaic,’ he says. ‘Quite short and with just one interval. A concerto followed by a symphony. Why shouldn’t we make them longer, with more intervals? We should be breaking the mould at the Proms. They’re a terrific opportunity to open up the concert programme.’
He’s keenly aware that the real Proms audience is not those sitting comfortably in their boxes in the Grand Tier sipping champagne and eating smoked salmon but the 1,400 Prommers who queue up even in the rain for a chance to stand for four long hours through the Glyndebourne Opera performance of Purcell’s The Faerie Queen. Tickets cost just £5, which is roughly equivalent to that 1895 shilling. ‘It’s their festival,’ says Wright. There may now be Proms in the Park, a Proms Literary Festival, film screenings and ‘family days’, but the Proms’ foundation are those summer evenings in the Albert Hall.
Every concert also has to work as a live broadcast on Radio Three; a point, Wright says, that’s often missed by the critics. They’re not just a concert-hall performance. Sixteen million listeners and viewers tuned in to the Proms at some stage last season, via Radio Three, BBC TV or the web.
‘Do you know what the First Night next year is going to be,’ I ask. ‘Yes,’ replies Wright immediately, without hesitation but without giving anything away. There’s nothing the critics can say now to change his mind.
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