IN A COUPLE of weeks’ time, the world’s biggest orchestral showcase gets underway. The BBC Proms, now in its 114th year and sporting more concerts than ever before, puts just about every other international festival in the shade. Some £9 million of licence-payers’ money goes into making its 84 concerts happen.
But is that a price worth paying from the public purse? Roger Wright, directing his first Proms season since assuming dual control of both the Proms and BBC Radio 3 (where he has been a very able controller for several years), has no qualms about its
true value. “It is all about quality and accessibility,” he says. “A season ticket for a Prommer works out at £2.23 per concert. A normal stalls ticket in the Royal Albert Hall will cost between £20 and £40. Compare that to the typical cost of seeing an average UK orchestra concert, let alone one by the Berlin or New York Philharmonic.”
In BBC terms, a more telling comparison might be to consider the thousands of brilliant musicians appearing at this years Proms – from the return of former punk violinist Nigel Kennedy and elusive pianist Murray Perahia to the back desk players of the Berlin Philharmonic – in relation to the many millions of pounds the Beeb squanders on blabbermouths such as Jonathan Ross. There is simply no comparison – especially when the Proms generates about £3.5 million in income to help offset the heavy costs of producing the season.
It’s also worth remembering that this national treasure is not simply about the Last Night of the Proms, when “England’s green and pleasant land” is ritualistically worshipped by mobs of flag-wavers trying to outclap the hackneyed accelerando of Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, then singing Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory as if they’re at a rugby match.
Thankfully, the lead-up to that is once again a blockbuster series of concerts that combines imagination with tradition; sophistication with adventurousness. This year’s Proms season – which runs from 18 July until 13 September – celebrates a number of anniversaries – most notably the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death and the centenary of Olivier Messiaen’s birth, but also other significant birthdays such as Edinburgh University music professor Nigel Osborne’s 60th and Scots composer Thea Musgrave’s 80th.
Indeed, by the time Sir Roger Norrington delivers the customary Last Night speech, 20 new works will have been premiered, including 11 BBC commissions.
One features in a tribute to Karlheinz Stockhausen on 2 August, the day he would have celebrated his 80th birthday. That concert – by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with soloists that include Scots percussionist Colin Currie – features new elements of the ongoing large-scale sequence Klang which Stockhausen was working on at the time of his death last December.
The scope of the Proms, as ever, stretches way beyond the posh environs of Kensington. It is, Wright reminds us, “a broadcast festival”, with nightly live transmissions on Radio 3, and regular televised slots on BBC 2 and BBC Four – in other words, capable of reaching millions of viewers and listeners in the UK and around the world.
This year, unprecedented numbers of viewers are expected to tune in as the rollercoaster broadcast revolution moves swiftly on. “For the first time ever, all televised Proms will be viewable through BBC iPlayer, meaning you can view these whenever it suits within a seven-day window,” Wright explains.
All of which is good news for those interested in following the fortunes of the many Scots involved, one way or another, this year. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will be in action four times, under the direction of chief conductor Ilan Volkov and also of his imminent successor Donald Runnicles.
Central to Volkov’s 19 August SSO Prom is the unveiling of Speakings, Jonathan Harvey’s final commission as the orchestra’s associate composer, which utilises software created in Paris’s IRCAM studios and will involve feeding the live sound of the SSO through computers, treating it instantaneously and sending the finished effects back into the Albert Hall.
On 6 September, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra performs Thea Musgrave’s Rainbow and Albert Roussel’s Bacchus et Ariane Suite No 2 under the baton of Stéphane Denève.
And what’s this we see infiltrating the 2008 Last Night? A new work by the young Scots composer Anna Meredith? If Wright is trying to stamp his own mark on the Proms directorship, then he has taken a brave step in programming this so-far unnamed work directly before Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance No 1, that normally protected part of the Proms’ sacred closing ritual.
The concept is daring. “My idea was to try and link up the performers in the hall with those in the simultaneous Proms in the Park events throughout the UK, including Glasgow Green,” Wright explains.
“How Anna achieves it, I’ve left completely up to her,” he adds, mindful of the potential perils of such an ambitious tie-up plan. “I don’t know how she’s going to do it, but she’s a composer who is used to creating bold gestures.”
And talking of bold gestures on the Last Night, where has Henry Wood’s perennial Fantasia on British Sea Songs disappeared to? Frankly, I don’t care. Anything that takes the tweeness out of this museum piece is a step in the right direction – or should that be the Wright direction?
• The BBC Proms season begins on 18 July. Full details can be found online at:
www.bbc.co.uk/proms The full article contains 954 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
