Amid much stern diagnosis of the ills afflicting Britain by my colleague Tyler Brûlé, and his recommendations for radical surgery, can I point out something that seems right and doesn’t need changing but could do with a little more trumpet-blowing?

Actually there has been quite a lot of literal trumpet-blowing already at the 2008 Proms, and it was the trumpets blaring out their thrilling fanfare at the end of Brahms’s Second Symphony the other afternoon which had me singing along and applauding in rather absurd fashion at my desk, and decided me to write this piece.

I was listening again (a brilliant new technology that has quietly transformed the radio experience) to the kind of Prom that some cultural pundits might think entirely pointless: Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony and Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto and Second Symphony, a trio of 19th- century warhorses long since put out to grass. This was the kind of thing that UK culture minister Margaret Hodge had in mind, I imagine, when earlier this year she accused the Proms of not doing enough to attract audiences of diverse backgrounds, and scheduling too much music by dead white males (I made that last bit up). Certainly you could say that here was a thoroughly old-fashioned celebration of the kind of classical music that would have had Queen Victoria and Prince Albert dancing in their graves. It turned out this was a replica of a Prom given in 1958.

But what a magnificent concert it was. Jiri Belohlavek may have an unpronounceable name but he is bringing out the best playing I have ever heard from the Proms’ proud but sometimes moody house orchestra, the BBC Symphony.

Unlike some high-profile superstars of the podium, Belohlavek is a musician’s musician, whose strengths are subtle blending and balancing of textures, long-term shaping and knowing when to hold back, in order to deliver the ultimate nobility of effect.

The Mendelssohn sounded lithe, fresh-minted and had a Byronic dash I have seldom heard in this familiar music. Lars Vogt’s performance of the gigantic concerto was everything you could wish for: epic sweep, ferocious defiance in the scherzo, tenderness in the slow movement and the unique combination you need of grandeur and delicacy in the finale. But it was the symphony that clinched it: a vindication of Brahms’s intention to write a summer idyll of a symphony, not without deep shadow, but ending in an exultant blaze of glory that brought the house down. Listening to this performance and others, I think that despite being a signed-up fan I have underestimated the Proms.

I am not the only one: the BBC is strangely reticent about one of its greatest glories.

Yet I believe we need the Proms to remind us what music really means. Take that Brahms Second Symphony: I have a CD of it and listen to it from time to time, but though it happens to be a recording of a live performance, the experience of listening to it in the study can’t compare with the live communing you get in the concert hall, or even, for some reason I can’t explain, listening live on the radio.

The vast yet companionable Albert Hall contributes enormously to the sense of occasion. This is good fortune, born out of murderous terror. The Proms started off, in 1897, in the much smaller (but acoustically superior) Queen’s Hall. Robert Newman, who ran the hall, and the young conductor Henry Wood, had a dream of what now seems breathtaking cultural arrogance (can we have a bit more of that, please?): “I am going to run nightly concerts,” Newman announced, “to train the public in easy stages.” He charged 1 shilling (5 pence) per concert and 1 guinea for a season ticket.

During the first world war, when anti-German feeling ran so high that DH Lawrence and his German wife Frieda were kept under surveillance at their cottage in Cornwall, Newman and Wood kept alive a more magnanimous spirit – one that did not damn great art by association: “the greatest examples of Music and Art”, they announced, as they continued to programme Beethoven and Brahms at the Proms, “are world possessions and unassailable, even by the prejudices of the hour”.

It was not the finest moment for German culture when the Luftwaffe reduced the Queen’s Hall to smoking ruins on the night of 10 May 1941. Henry Wood was undaunted. Even though the BBC, which took over the Proms in 1927, had pulled out on the outbreak of war, Wood continued to run them with private sponsorship, and moved the 1941 season to the Royal Albert Hall. He died three weeks after conducting the last concert of the 1944 season, one of those who kept culture alive in history’s darkest hour.

The Proms have gone from strength to strength since then, becoming ever more international, featuring new music, jazz and world music alongside Brahms and Beethoven, adding chamber music concerts in the Cadogan Hall.

They are inspiring in their nightly celebration of art’s power to inspire and hearten and move us, against all the forces that would deafen and kill. More trumpets, please.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres