Image: Sir Henry Wood conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms at their original home, the Queen's Hall, in 1937. He conducted the 'Promenade Concerts' for half a century and his Fantasia on British Sea Songs is a staple of the Last Night.
The BBC's continuing fruitful relationship with the Promenade Concerts began with the 1927 season when the very popular Proms were endangered by a loss of sponsorship. The Proms were established in 1895 by Robert Newman and Henry Wood to bring good music to a wide audience at an affordable price. The BBC saw that taking them on would provide a full season of concerts for broadcast and would fulfil the Corporation's remit to "inform, educate and entertain".
The first broadcast Prom, relayed from the Queen's Hall, featured Elgar's Cockaine Overture, Boccherini's Minuet in A for strings, Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, Rossini's William Tell Overture, excerpts from Coppelia, "Elizabeth's Greeting" from Tannha, and other songs and orchestral pieces by Stanford, Sibelius, Quilter, Parry and Schubert. Wood conducted and released a statement;
with the wholehearted of the wonderful medium of broadcasting I feel I am at last on the threshold of realising my lifelong ambition of truly democratising the message of music and making its beneficent effect universal.
When the Queen's Hall was bombed in 1941 the Proms moved to the Albert Hall, where they still run, and have expanded in recent years to include Proms in the Park and several other initiatives, taking the music out of the concert hall and to the audience.
