The Welsh Proms

The shared word causes more confusion than any other fact about the festival. Proms describes a concert format, not a brand belonging to one organisation, and two festivals can use it without any relationship between them.

What a proms festival is, and where the name comes from

A proms festival takes its name from the promenade concert, a form in which part of the audience stands in an open floor area instead of sitting in numbered seats. The word promenade is the clue: promenaders could walk about, talk between items, arrive late and leave early, and the standing floor was always the cheapest way in. The form goes back to the pleasure gardens of eighteenth-century London and was formalised in 1895, when the manager Robert Newman engaged the young conductor Henry Wood for a season of promenade concerts at the Queen's Hall.

The point of the format was never informality for its own sake. It was access. A standing floor lets a hall admit far more people than its seat count, and it changes who feels entitled to be in the room. Every festival that has used the word since has inherited that argument along with the name.

Why the Welsh Proms is not the BBC Proms

The Welsh Proms and the BBC Proms are separate festivals with separate origins, separate management and separate finances. The BBC Proms grew out of Newman and Wood's 1895 season, passed to the BBC in 1927, and has been held at the Royal Albert Hall since 1941, across roughly eight weeks of the summer. The Welsh Proms was founded in 1986, at St David's Hall in Cardiff, and runs in July. Neither has any financial, artistic or broadcasting stake in the other. The resemblance begins and ends with a word that describes a way of putting on concerts.

St David's Hall, the building the festival was built around

St David's Hall is the national concert hall of Wales and the room the festival has occupied from the start. It was built between 1978 and 1982 to a design by the Seymour Harris Partnership, opened in 1982 and officially opened on 15 February 1983, and is now a listed building. It seats 2,000. Its plan is polygonal and terraced, with the audience on stepped blocks around and behind the platform in the manner of Hans Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie, rather than in one long rake. The hall carries a large concert organ, which is why an Organ Prom is possible.

The plan matters to a proms audience: because the seating wraps the platform, nobody is far from the orchestra, and the promenade area sits close to the players rather than at the back of a long room.

The strands: from orchestral evenings to a family of proms

The Welsh Proms began as orchestral evenings and nothing else. The season later broadened into named strands alongside the main symphonic programmes:

• The Family Prom, pitched at a mixed-age audience rather than specialists.
• The Tiddly Prom, aimed at the youngest children, for whom the length and the conventions of a full symphony concert are the barrier rather than the music.
• The Organ Prom, which uses the hall's own instrument, an asset most concert halls built after 1960 lack.
• The Jazz Prom, which puts a different repertoire and a different kind of listening into the same building.

Widening a season this way is festival design, not decoration. A festival that only ever presents 90 minutes of symphonic repertoire to an audience that already knows it will recruit nobody. Strands of different length and formality give a hall several front doors.

Cardiff's other music institutions, and how the festival sits among them

Cardiff holds an unusually dense set of musical institutions for its size, and visitors regularly confuse them. Welsh National Opera, founded in 1943, is a year-round opera company with its own orchestra and chorus, resident at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay rather than at St David's Hall. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales, which dates from 1928, is both a broadcasting and a concert orchestra, based in BBC Hoddinott Hall at the same Bay complex. The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, founded in 1949, is the Welsh conservatoire. The National Eisteddfod of Wales, annual in its modern form since 1861, moves between north and south Wales and is conducted entirely in Welsh; the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, founded in 1947, is a separate international competition. Hughes was music director of the National Eisteddfod in 1977.

Against that background the Welsh Proms is the simplest thing on the list: a July festival, in one hall, with a founding artistic director. It is also the part of the Cardiff calendar most likely to be a listener's first orchestral concert, a role that matters as much to the audience for Grace Williams, Alun Hoddinott and William Mathias as to the audience for a living composer such as Karl Jenkins.

The 30,000 pounds, and Welsh Proms Cymru

The 30,000 pounds is the figure the BBC reported on 18 April 2018, covering the festival's loss of Welsh Government funding. Set against the cost of a symphony concert the sum is not enormous: an orchestral evening carries the fees of 80 to 100 players, soloists, hall costs and three to four rehearsals of three hours. Set against a festival balance sheet it can be decisive, because subsidy is usually the margin rather than the bulk, and the margin determines whether a season happens at the planned size. The festival now runs as Welsh Proms Cymru, Cymru being the Welsh for Wales.

The festival in order

A festival founded in 1986 and still running under one artistic direction is rarer than it sounds. Most summer festivals change hands and character every decade. The Welsh Proms has instead accumulated its strands slowly, in the same building and the same month, which is why the promenade argument of 1895 is still legible in it.

Also in this programme

• Owain Arwel Hughes, conductor: the working life in orderA biography of the working life
• The London orchestrasPhilharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic
• Boult, Haitink and Kempe: how a conductor was trainedThe teachers: Boult, Haitink and Kempe
• Welsh classical musicThe composers, the choirs and the institutions