Proms

The Proms (or, to give them their full title, the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts) is a series of live performances that started at the Queens Hall in London in 1895 and after that building was destroyed by bombing in 1941 moved to present home of the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore. Their name comes from the practice initiated by Sir Henry Wood, their first chief conductor, of allowing areas in front of the stage and in the galleries for the audience to walk around and (in the earliest days) eat and smoke. The Proms run from July to September each year and attract a wealth of international talent. Since 1927 the series has been run by the BBC, who now broadcast each Prom in full on BBC Radio 3 and televise many. The Last Night has passed into the folklore of British culture, being treated as more of a party than a formal concert, with considerable audience participation.

In 1970, the concerts began to host popular music in order to extend Wood's remit of reaching out to the masses who would not normally attend a concert hall, and the first of these was Soft Machine on 13 August. Peel is known to have attended at least two Proms.The first (1971-07-24) featured Charles Groves and the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra with Radu Lupu performing Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor, preceded by Sibelius' 6th Symphony and succeeded by a new piece by Bernard Naylor and Elgar's familiar Enigma Variations. The second was performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under Yan Pascal Tortelier and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who conducted his own piece, 'The Beltane Fire' (which John appears not to have enjoyed). Grigory Sokolov was the soloist in Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto no. 3 in C minor. In both, JP noted the showmanship of the pianists and was somewhat appalled by the behaviour of the Promenaders in the first and amazed by the stoicism of the people in his box in the second.

Links

 * Wikipedia
 * Proms Performance Archive