An audience-free Proms season from the BBC

• SO here we are in 2020 with an audience-free Proms season from the BBC.

And despite nearly 30 years of polite lobbying – with exception of a brief nod seven years ago to mark the centenary year of the composer’s birth – the organisers of this tax-paid British music festival have resolutely and inexplicably ignored the symphonies and choral works of the late George Lloyd, even as the likes of the excellent London-based Ealing Symphony Orchestra, under its visionary conductor John Gibbons, have proceeded to schedule the first complete cycle of the former orchestral works – all 12 of them, some of which are superb examples of the genre.

We get repeated Proms programming of the same compositions, with liberal doses of stuff from other 20th-century composers, yet Lloyd’s melodic uplifting music doesn’t get a look-in’. And now the BBC wants to reimpose its licence fee on me.

Hah! Shameless and dismissive are the words that comes to mind.

MARK NEWBERRY,
W1