A lively era comes to an end this summer, when Nicholas Kenyon presides over his tenth and last BBC Proms season before going off to become the managing director of the Barbican. It’s spooky that his tenure has more or less coincided with Tony Blair’s as Prime Minister, because their regimes have been quite similar. Like Blair’s New Labour, Kenyon has promoted a “big tent” policy at the Proms: strong on diversity, inclusiveness and impact. And, like Blair, he has sometimes been accused of caring more about style and presentation than intellectual substance.
It’s undeniable that Kenyon’s decade hasn’t been as notable for avant-garde shocks or bold commissions as, say, William Glock’s Prom seasons in the 1960s were. When, as an impressionable youth, I attended the bloodcurdling Proms premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Worldes Blisin 1969, I watched with astonishment as hundreds of outraged punters stampeded for the exits. Similarly, when John Drummond, Kenyon’s predecessor, provocatively programmed Harrison Birtwistle’s Panic on the Last Night in 1995 – knowing full well that it would be televised on BBC One at peak time on a Saturday evening – the BBC switchboard was jammed with calls from appalled viewers.
Nothing in Kenyon’s era has caused such a furore – not even his faux pas of concocting an entire season last year without including a single woman composer or conductor. He is too silky-smooth an operator, and perhaps too emollient a personality; he doesn’t get a buzz from ruffling feathers.
That’s a pity. The Proms are still the world’s most wide-ranging music festival – fantastic value for money, if you stand in the arena. And Kenyon has, to his credit, extended the historical scope even further, particularly in Renaissance and Baroque music. In search of younger audiences he has also taken the Proms out of the Albert Hall far more than any of his predecessors did – venturing not just to other classical venues, but to places such as the Brixton Academy and the Hackney Empire. But in terms of musical content, his seasons have become a little bland. It’s hard to imagine Drummond or Glock programming an evening with Michael Ball.
What Kenyon has done brilliantly is to widen what might be called the “ownership” of the Proms. Stuffy purists might raise a pained eyebrow at such downmarket innovations as the Nation’s Favourite Prom (the music selected by a phone-in vote), or the Blue Peter Proms, or the Proms in the Park – a simultaneous singalong that has succeeded in doing what many critics thought impossible: making the Last Night shenanigans even more naff than they already were. But such gimmicks are a price worth paying if they persuade the ratings-obsessed executives running the BBC to continue picking up the tab for an 80-concert series of mostly minority-interest classical music.
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Anyway, some of Kenyon’s headline-grabbing initiatives have proved to be highly successful in artistic terms. The brainwave of devoting whole days to a particular branch of musical life, for instance – choirs a couple of years ago; brass bands this year – is a wonderful way of tapping into the fanatical enthusiasm and energy that performers, amateur and professional, bring to their special musical passion. And the wheeze of bringing Wagner’s Ring to the Proms – with one instalment a year, culminating in this year’s G?tterd?mmerung – has been a triumph. Indeed, if I had to select one Prom that outshone all others in Kenyon’s decade, it would have to be the electrifying performance of Die Walk?re two years ago, with Pl?cido Domingo and Bryn Terfel bringing the house down.
Kenyon has also shown himself to be a master opportunist in the best sense. When the Princess of Wales and Georg Solti died in the same week in his first season, he quickly programmed a Verdi Requiem to pay homage to both. And when the terrible events of 9/11 happened in the last week of the 2001 Proms, he responded with lightning instinct and impeccable taste by ripping out all the jingoistic songs and jolly romps from the Last Night, and substituting mostly American music of a reflective nature. My only regret – curmudgeon that I am – was that Kenyon allowed all the hackneyed Last Night nonsense to return the following year.
His successor is Roger Wright, the controller of Radio 3, whose controversial attempts to widen that station’s remit – particularly into world music and jazz – suggest that he will continue to develop Kenyon’s “big tent” approach. But the traditionalists can hardly complain. After all, Henry Wood devised much the same all-inclusive strategy – something old, something new, something profound, something fluffy – when he founded the Proms 112 years ago.