Last Night of the Proms: What will be performed at this year’s concert and why has it been criticised?

Long-running popular recital divides opinion among music lovers

The Proms, Britain’s world famous eight-week classical music festival, draws to a close on Saturday 8 September.

Centred around London’s Royal Albert Hall and running since 1895, the celebration of orchestral music culminates with the Last Night of the Proms, perhaps its defining event.

A tradition as British as plum pudding or grumbling about rail replacement bus services, here’s everything you need to know about 2018’s closer.

Where can I watch the Last Night of the Proms?

Tickets for the Last Night of the Proms at the Albert Hall in Kensington have, unfortunately, long since sold out.

However, a live broadcast will be shown on BBC Two on Saturday night from 7.15pm, the performance resuming for its second half on BBC One at 9pm. Katie Derham is on hosting duties. The evening will also be broadcast in its entirety on BBC Radio 3.

Proms in the Park events will meanwhile take place around the country to coincide with the evening: in Hyde Park in London, on Glasgow Green in Scotland, at Colwyn Bay in Wales and at the Titanic Slipways in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Thousands of unofficial viewing parties will no doubt also be taking place across the UK.

What works will be performed?

Sir Andrew Davis, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, will again pick up the baton, guiding the orchestra, its chorus and the BBC Singers.

This year’s programme includes the usual hardy perennials by Henry Wood, Thomas Arne and Hubert Parry, the latter composer honoured in the centenary year of his death.

A new commission from Roxanna Panufnik will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, the final premiere in a season that has showcased over 40 original pieces.

Saxophonist Jess Gillam will take to the spotlight to perform Milhaud’s Scaramouche before Canadian baritone Gerald Finley performs a solo from the Broadway musical Carousel by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

The full programme is as follows:

• Roxanna Panufnik - Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light
• Charles Villiers Stanford – Songs of the Sea
• Hubert Parry – Blest Pair of Sirens
• Darius Milhaud​ – Scaramouche
• Richard Rodgers – ‘Soliloquy’ from Carousel
• Henry Wood – Fantasia on British Sea-Songs
• Thomas Arne – Rule, Britannia! (Arr. Malcolm Sargent)
• Edward Elgar – Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 in D Major, "Land of Hope and Glory"
• Hubert Parry – Jerusalem (Orch. Edward Elgar)
• The National Anthem (Arr. Benjamin Britten)
• Auld Lang Syne

How were the Proms founded?

The first “Promenade Concert” was held at the Queen’s Hall in London on 10 August 1895 at the instigation of theatrical impresario Robert Newman.

“I am going to run nightly concerts to train the public in easy stages,” Newman told musical director Henry Wood. “Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.”

Tickets for its earliest events were cheap and eating, drinking and smoking were all permitted in the auditorium, aligning the atmosphere closer to the informality of the music halls than was then customary at concerts and recitals.

The first half of the closing performance was dedicated to more high-brow fare before giving way to a “Grand Fantasia” of snippets from popular operas.

The Proms quickly expanded into a season and encouraged young musicians and cutting-edge composers from its earliest years, meanwhile settling into proven routines, such as Wagner Night on Monday and Beethoven on Fridays. German composers swiftly fell out of fashion from 1914, however.

Sir Henry Wood (Erich Auerbach/Getty)

The BBC became involved with the Proms in 1927 with its first radio broadcast and the concerts relocated to the Royal Albert Hall in 1941 after Luftwaffe bombs had decimated the Queen’s. Wood, a stalwart since the Proms' inception, passed away in 1944.

Malcolm Sargent took the reins in the 1950s, when a Viennese-themed evening became an institution. The Proms has grown ever since, welcoming musicians from Eastern Europe, staging complete operas and showcasing world music.

Why has the event been criticised?

For many, the Last Night of the Proms is an uncomplicated and joyous celebration of British music, rousing, sing-along heritage hymns to encourage a spirit of togetherness.

But the occasion has been criticised in recent years for promoting an outmoded brand of militaristic nationalism. The repetition of “Rule, Britannia!”, “Land of Hope and Glory”, “Jerusalem” and “God Save the Queen” year after year, it is argued, has more to do with wallowing in cosy jingoism and Brexit hubris than the realities of life in 21st century Britain.

Labour culture secretary Margaret Hodge caused a stir in 2008 when she attacked the Last Night of the Proms in a speech at the Institute of Public Policy Research for not being sufficiently reflective of multicultural modern Britain or alive to working class taste.

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, was forced to insist he found it to be a “wonderful, democratic and quintessentially British institution”.

David Cameron, then opposition leader, hit back: “Margaret Hodge is wrong. We need more things where people celebrate Britishness and people think the Union Jack is a great symbol of togetherness. It is a classic example of a Labour politician not getting the sort of things people like to celebrate – culture and identity and a great British institution.”

Critics also commonly object to “prommers” waving the flag, cheering or brandishing unlikely props, from inflatable bananas to umbrellas, a custom that has evolved incrementally since the Last Night was first shown on television in 1947 and enjoyed by viewers around the world as “typically British”. Suggestions that such antics are gauche or unbecoming are inevitably met with counter-accusations of snobbery.

Exception has further been taken to the Last Night overshadowing the rest of the festival’s more challenging offerings, the “dumbing down” its doggedly populist agenda represents and the high cost and difficulty of obtaining tickets.

Perhaps most devastatingly, The Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty described last year’s event as “an evening for people who find telethons entertaining and miss Dave Lee Travis from the Radio 1 schedules” and symptomatic of “a country in danger of believing its own caricature”.

For all that, the Last Night of the Proms rolls on, as dauntless, unstoppable and popular as ever.