Proms 2022: back to normal, but why settle for ‘normal’?

The programme announced today for this summer’s BBC Proms makes much of its return to business as normal. There are a full eight weeks of concerts in the Royal Albert Hall this summer, after two years of severe restrictions – in 2020 just a fortnight of live music was livestreamed from an empty hall; last year’s season was also truncated and given almost entirely by British-based orchestras. But it’s back to the usual formula this year, with a large-scale choral work – Verdi’s Requiem – to launch the jamboree on 15 July, and a traditional Last Night conducted by Dalia Stasevska, with cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and soprano Lise Davidsen as the soloists.

But in other, less positive, ways things are just a bit too much like they were in 2019, when the season seemed lacking in adventure and overcautious in its approach. There’s very little feeling of enterprise and imagination in the 2022 concerts either. Programmes seem to have been planned in a distinctly risk-averse way, with attention devoted to making sure that every politically correct box is safely ticked, with the full range of family concerts, gaming and relaxed proms, but perhaps not enough thought given to what might be genuinely challenging or adventurous in what still insists on describing itself as the biggest classical music festival in the world.

The one major and welcome innovation comes in the complementary Monday series of lunchtime chamber music, which in recent years has taken place in London’s Cadogan Hall. This time the series of eight concerts is dispersed around the country, with recitals taking place from Truro to Glasgow, Belfast to Battersea. And for one evening concert the Proms deserts the Royal Albert Hall for an excursion to the Printworks in Rotherhithe, where English National Opera will present an “operatic spectacle” conceived by counter-tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo that mixes Handel arias with extracts from Philip Glass’s operas and song cycles (3 September).

The year’s significant musical anniversaries of course get their due attention. The 150th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’ birth is marked not with a complete series of the symphonies but with a more wide-ranging selection of his works including the rarely heard tuba and oboe concertos. The bicentenary of César Franck, and the centenaries of George Walker, Doreen Carwithen and Iannis Xenakis are duly acknowledged, though in keeping with an approach that seems to worry about giving the audience anything that is too “difficult” or rebarbative, only one of the pieces by Xenakis is at all substantial. Ethel Smyth is generously represented too, not because there is any particular anniversary to mark, but mainly, one suspects, because Glyndebourne is bringing its new production of Smyth’s The Wreckers to the Albert Hall, providing a handy focus for a thematic thread.

Though there is no longer the parade of the world’s orchestral great and good that used to be a feature of the final weeks of Proms seasons, there is at least this year a healthy representation of orchestras from overseas, including the newly formed Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra (31 July), the Oslo Philharmonic (12 August), and the Philadelphia Orchestra (8 and 9 September).

There is the usual scattering of specially commissioned pieces and local premieres, but what’s missing are the special events, the kind of concerts that only the Proms, with all the resources of the BBC and the flexible space of the Albert Hall could afford to put on, whether that is a rarely performed opera, massive orchestral score or an electro-acoustic novelty. That kind of ambition seems to be nonexistent in planning the Proms nowadays, and it’s very depressing.

Andrew Clement’s Proms highlights

Cassandra Miller premiere (18 July)
The first of the year’s Proms commissions promises to be one of the most interesting. Miller is the latest composer to write a large-scale work for the viola player Lawrence Power, who introduces her concerto with the BBC Philharmonic.

The Site of an Investigation (28 July)
Jennifer Walshe’s deconstruction of a symphony receives its London premiere, in an unlikely pairing with Brahms’ German Requiem; Ilan Volkov conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Il Tabarro (30 July)
A concert performance of Puccini’s tragic one-acter, with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder, and Natalya Romaniw, George Gagnidze and Ivan Gyngazov as the protagonists.

Prague Panoramas (5 August)
Julian Anderson’s second symphony, inspired by photographs of the Czech capital in the 1940s, is premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under Semyon Bychkov.

Australian World Orchestra (23 August)
Zubin Mehta makes an all-too-rare London appearance conducting a band drawn from 50 of the world’s leading orchestra in a programme of Webern, Debussy and Brahms.

Märchentänze (26 August)
Pekka Kuusisto is the soloist in Thomas Adès’s piece for violin and orchestra, based on English folk tunes.

This New Noise (30 August)
The BBC celebrates its own 100th anniversary with a multimedia commission from the band Public Service Broadcasting, using audio and visual material from the corporation’s archives.

The Dream of Gerontius (31 August)
Allan Clayton follows his huge success in the title role of the Royal Opera’s new production of Peter Grimes, by taking the leading role in Elgar’s masterpiece; Edward Gardner conducts the London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, Jamie Barton and James Platt are the other soloists.

Berliner Philharmoniker (3 and 4 September)
Kirill Petrenko brings his great orchestra to London for two concerts; the first is devoted to a single work, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, the second pairs Schnittke’s Viola Concerto with Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony.

Missa Solemnis (7 September)
John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Monteverdi Choir and the period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, with soloists Lucy Crowe, Ann Hallenberg, Giovanni Sala and William Thomas, in Beethoven’s late choral masterpiece.