The 'world's biggest music festival' has grown significantly in the last 10 years. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Anyone who bought a programme at the proms in the last week of the season got an unexpected bonus. In the centre of each booklet was an eight-page pull-out supplement, entitled BBC Proms 1996-2007. There was a vaguely self-congratulatory air about it: fulsome copy-writing - "the proms now reaches out to ever wider audiences in ways that could never have been predicted " - combined with dazzling statistics about the steadily increasing numbers turning up to the Albert Hall and those that hear each concert via Radio 3 or online, was followed by a chronology of each of the last 12 seasons, all designed to leave the impression that during Nicholas Kenyon's tenure as Proms controller, which began, of course, in 1996 and ended last weekend, the self-styled world's biggest music festival has gone from strength to strength.
There's no doubt, certainly, that the Proms now is a very different animal from the one that Kenyon inherited from John Drummond in 1995. To start with it's evolved into a many-headed creature, sprouting not only Proms in the Park to enable even more people to "enjoy" the Last Night celebrations, but also a lunchtime chamber music series away from the Albert Hall (most recently at Cadogan Hall) and, for the first time this year, a series of Saturday afternoon matinée concerts. In such ways Kenyon certainly broadened the appeal of the Proms, and perhaps in doing so went some way in deflecting the populist pressures on the season that are surely ever present within the BBC hierarchy itself.
Had all those extras been introduced without affecting the integrity of the 70-odd orchestral concerts that are the core of the season, then the final balance sheet would be drawn up very much in the outgoing controller's favour. But over the last decade Kenyon's programming seems to have become progressively more box-office orientated, with less risk-taking, and far fewer really bold initiatives, putting on works, whether centuries old or brand new, because he believed they needed to be heard, rather than because of the size of the audience they were likely to attract. The hiving off of nearly all the genuinely demanding contemporary music into the late-night concerts has been the most obvious manifestation of that tendency; new works have been allowed in the main-evening concerts only if they were likely to be generally audience-friendly, and the time-honoured principle of combining the popular with the more challenging - Beethoven's Fifth Symphony alongside a Birtwistle piece, say - has been increasingly ignored. Kenyon may have done a great deal to broaden the appeal of the Proms, but the way in which his commissioning and his programming have served new music is far less convincing.
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