Grasping the content of the Proms these days has become a bewildering business. The best image I can give is of a contrapuntal web, teeming with themes, in which the principal subjects stand out against the detail, but where the detail nonetheless clamours for attention and the sheer profusion of it can seem overwhelming. When the planners inform their followers that the ‘highlights’ of the Proms Literary Festival ‘include’…one quickly realises that here is a festival which has moved on from being a simple series of orchestral concerts.
The press are furnished with two publications at the beginning of the season: the standard prospectus, which lists all the concerts in order, and an information booklet, which throws what the prospectus says into the air and lets it come to earth in so many categories that the reader of the prospectus might wonder where all those connections and interconnections were hidden. I am guessing that the strategy is to make the core activity of the Proms — the 7 or 7.30 p.m. orchestral concerts — seem as available as possible to as many subgroups in our society as possible, by tacking on to the core all manner of exciting and even sexy (look at the style of some of the photographs) activities to seduce and entice. Meanwhile the core carries on much as it always did, except that now there is the tireless justifying of every selection by reference to one or more of the myriad underlying themes, anniversaries to the fore. Anniversaries have long been held by the Proms to be a convenient peg on which to hang programmes, but this year this whole subplot has gone so mad it is beginning to seem minatory.
What has been lost and gained? The gain is that audiences are indeed prepared to turn out in serious numbers to concerts which not long ago would have bombed. There is a buzz about the whole Proms package which has encouraged people to visit mainstream classical repertoire of all kinds for the first time. These people do not seem to mind if the featured composer is Beethoven, Mahler or Maxwell Davies because they have been put in the mood to do something exciting and, once present, are left in no doubt that they are. In addition, they can attend more talks then ever about the repertoire they will hear (these days packaged as ‘Proms Plus’), or attend the Literary Festival, or go to the Film series, or take part in one of the many Proms Family events. And they don’t even have to be in London to join in.
Against this gain it seems fuddy-duddy to think of the days when the core activity was the only activity. It seems now like an age of innocence just to plan a really good programme per se and then invite one of the great orchestras of the world to play it. But those were the concerts that attracted me, and in essence they still do. The two Vienna Philharmonic appearances this year, potentially the highlights of the season to someone who thinks like me, come over as specialist events now, with too-predictable repertoires. Something I loved has fallen through the cracks. In the modern Proms even concerts of the central European symphonic tradition played by its greatest exponent go into a special box, which is put alongside a profusion of other boxes, to construct ‘the Proms’.
But the amount of energy and imagination that has gone into creating this giant fugue of a festival is palpable. It is the biggest, most spectacular, most engaging classical-music festival in the world. And it really still is a festival of classical music.
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