More of everything

Peter Phillips on Nicholas Kenyon’s Proms swansong and a lost masterpiece

Nicholas Kenyon’s swansong at the Proms this summer is surely the most elaborately complicated, one might say contrapuntally conceived, series of concerts ever staged. Just reading the blurb makes one’s head spin — so many themes, so many anniversaries, so many reasons for paying attention that there comes a point when one might, most ungratefully, just wish that a concert was there because the performers wanted to perform the music they had chosen. But I suppose that if you are to live within the hype of a series this extended (90 concerts and countless fringe activities), you have to have some binding. There really is more of everything, not least in striving to attract new audiences.

This is the really new aspect to the Proms, the one that wasn’t so fully there before Kenyon. Perhaps we always had the Blue Peter Prom for children, one forgets; but now there is a Proms Family Orchestra, where ‘family members, whether mums, dads, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles or grandparents’ sit alongside each other making music; and a Brass Day; and an expanded Young Composers Competition; and a new ‘dramatic musical piece’ which will star 40 children in the main roles.