Programming the Proms

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’.