Prom snub!

Recently the BBC published its programme for the 2008 Promenade Concert Season at the Royal Albert Hall.

As always anniversaries were being marked, especially 100 years since the birth of Messaien and the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams's passing. One away fixture and one home, if you like.

This is all fine and good even if the death of Stockhausen last year had, in my opinion, given rise to far too generous an allocation for a composer who hardly captured the imagination of the serious music-listening public, but was a byword for the kind of avant garde nonsense that can barely be classified as music in any recognisable sense. Noises, yes; music, hmmm........?

Amidst all of this provision I am utterly appalled and astonished that the 25th anniversary of the death of Herbert Howells has been completely overlooked. Plenty of Elliot Carter, Mark-Anthony Turnage and a host of other lesser lights but not a note of music from possibly the finest English composer of his generation.

Even his teacher at the RCM, Sir C.V.Stanford, gets an outing with his Piano Concerto. Stanford, who numbered Holst, Finzi and the great VW himself amongst his pupils, himself expressed the view that Howells was the most gifted of them all.

At this most English of music festivals it is appalling that his anniversary should be ignored in this way. Too easily dismissed by many as a composer of church music, he was, in fact, better known until the late 1920s for his orchestral and chamber works.

A performance of his luscious 1st Piano Concerto, or his choral masterpiece Hymnus Paradisi would have more than graced the Royal Albert Hall. Even if this was too much to contemplate, surely there could have been space for his Phantasy Quartet, or the Elegy for Viola, Quartet and String Orchestra (a piece that owes much to the Tallis Fantasia and would have linked in nicely with all the VW hullaballoo) in one of the smaller venues.

But no, Roger Wright and his predecessor in the job have seen fit to discard the work of this English master in favour of such foreign luminaries as Demessieux, Roussel and Varese (who, indeed!). It is no use the BBC defending this on the grounds that Howells was Composer of the Week on Radio 3 earlier this year - this is a gaffe of embarrassing proportions. Shame on you, Mr Wright.