BBC Proms make international debut over four days in Melbourne

The BBC’s music festival is coming to Melbourne.

Alondra de la Parra with the QSO

David Pickard was 16 years old when his parents took him to his first Prom at London’s Royal ­Albert Hall. The year was 1977; the piece was Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with mezzosoprano Janet Baker, conducted by Andrew Davis. The effect on the teenager was transformative.

“Like many people, the Proms really kickstarted my love of classical music,” says Pickard, 55, sitting in a room at Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC tucked between central London’s Regents Park and Oxford Street. “I got shivers down my spine and this huge feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’d never had an experience like it.”

Previously the long-term general director of Glyndebourne Opera Festival in Sussex, Pickard took up the role of director of the BBC Proms last November. His enthusiasm, for the post and for classical music in general, is palpable.

“Schumann is probably my favourite composer,” says the affable father of two. “I was a chorister at school so I grew up loving the rhythm, drama and colour of it. Mozart, of course. Verdi and ­Wagner for their operas. Something I’m really enjoying about this new job is discovering thrilling young composers like [Radiohead guitarist] Jonny Greenwood; I hadn’t realised the scope of his work.”

An eight-week summer season of concerts, workshops and talks, the BBC Proms has been delighting audiences in Britain and ­beyond for a remarkable 121 years. This month “the world’s greatest classical music festival” makes its international debut in Melbourne with a sort of mini-Proms: a four-day program of new music, master­works, free chamber music concerts and background talks. A snapshot of all the elements that make the BBC Proms great.

Long-term planning cycles meant that programs for BBC Proms Australia and BBC Proms 2016 were largely in place when Pickard started. The appointment of this mild-mannered opera lover to a frontline post that demands bold vision and ruthless decision-making was deemed a surprise choice: Pickard’s predecessor, Roger Wright, a former controller for BBC Radio 3 (which broadcasts every Proms concert live in Britain), set high standards with projects including a tie-in with the 2012 Olympics, a World Music Proms featuring traditional West African musicians and a complete Wagner Ring cycle conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

For now, Pickard is keeping quiet on his future programming ideas. “The original remit of the Proms is to bring the best possible classic music to the broadest possible audience, and if you don’t lose sight of those two things then you can expand and change and ­develop. Last year we introduced a Proms Guide app; we’re always trying to reach beyond the Royal Albert Hall.”

While the Proms take place at other London venues including the Royal College of Music and Cadogan Hall, a former Christian Science Church off Sloane Square, it’s the informal, hugely popular concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington with which they are most associated.

Last ­August, reluctant to call in favours, Pickard stood in the queue for limited reduced rate tickets to a sold-out Proms opera, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, and watched from a balcony up in the gods. “I thought, ‘I’ll go and be a Prommer again,’ ” he says of the popular Proms tradition of standing in the Albert Hall’s arena or gallery areas. “It was amazing, the way this small-scale piece of music pinged through to me. I was struck by the variety of that promenading crowd. There was a tourist with her sandwiches in a carrier bag next to a music student with his violin. The Proms isn’t just about the people on the stage. It’s about the people in the audience, who are part of the atmosphere.”

Nowhere more so than the famed Last Night of the Proms, a deep knee-bending, Union Jack-waving celebration of British tradition featuring rousing ren­ditions of anthems including Jerusalem and Rule Britannia. BBC Proms Australia will have its own Last Night, hosted by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor Andrew Davis — the Englishman who conducted Pickard’s first Prom, and who has helmed more Last Nights than any other conductor.

“Come dressed up in red, white and blue and fly your flag high,” trumpets the program notes. Whether Australians will go in for such old-fashioned fervour, however jolly, remains to be seen.

Australia is a priority territory for the public service broadcaster, whose funding model — the BBC licence fee — is proving increasingly controversial (as the renewal of the corporation’s royal charter approaches in January 2017, the Proms brand, the jewel in the BBC crown, may well be used as a bargaining chip).

ABC Classic FM has long broadcast an annual selection of BBC Proms. The station is a broadcast partner of the inaugural BBC Proms Australia, hosting four chamber music concerts showcasing young talent such as German baritone Benjamin Appl and the ABC Young Performer of the Year, clarinetist Lloyd Van’t Hoff. ABC Classic FM’s Mairi ­Nicolson and BBC Radio 3’s Petroc Tre­lawny, who has presented the Proms on radio and television for more than a decade, will co-present.

“The variety of the Proms still thrills me,” says Trelawny, 44. “Great orchestras from Berlin, Boston and Vienna. Concert performances of operas. New visiting orchestras bringing something unique from overseas; I’m thinking Borusan Philharmonic from Istanbul and the MSO (which played the RAH in 2014).

“We have all the ingredients right for Australia. I’m excited about the opening night” — the world premiere of Nigel Westlake’s Dream of Flying featuring British star cellist Laura van der Heijden — “and I’ve heard lots of great things about [Mexican conductor] Alondra de la Parra, so am looking forward to hearing her with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.”

Just as the BBC Proms balances the tried and tested with the new and risky — think three Doctor Who-themed Proms and last year’s Ibiza club night Prom with DJ Pete Tong — so too will BBC Proms Australia. Prom 3 & 4 is a concert with wildlife footage and on-screen narration by British naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough, adapted from his BBC TV series Life Story. And the wildcard of the Melbourne season? Thum Prints, a performance by the QSO and beat boxer Tom Thum billed as “somewhere between jazz, hip-hop and an off-the-wall Rite of Spring”.

Whether Pickard will be programming anything similarly groundbreaking for the BBC Proms is yet to be seen. While his conservative air suggests otherwise (asked what kind of band his eldest son plays in, he says: “I don’t know, a loud one”), his 14-year stint at Glyndebourne includes successful runs of operas such as Britten’s Billy Budd and Handel’s Guilio Cesare. He was at the helm when Glyndebourne became the first British opera house to stream performances live.

“I’m proud of the fact you could see all the operas at Glyndebourne for free on the internet,” Pickard says. “It was all about reaching greater numbers, and the same goes for the Proms. We’re reaching out internationally with BBC Proms Australia, which has everything except the Royal Albert Hall. I’m hoping it’s the start of something big.” He pauses, smiles. “So we can do things like this all over the world.”

BBC Proms Australia is at Arts Centre Melbourne and Melbourne Recital Centre, April 13-16.