Nicholas Kenyon

Sir Nicholas Roger Kenyon CBE (born 23 February 1951 in Cheshire) is an English music administrator, editor and writer on music. He was responsible for the BBC Proms in 1996–2007, after which he was appointed Managing Director of the Barbican Centre.

Education and career[]

Having attended St Bede's College, Manchester and played bassoon with Stockport Youth Orchestra,^{[citation needed]} Kenyon studied history at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating, he worked for the English Bach Festival, and as a freelance writer on music. From 1979 to 1982 he was a music critic for The New Yorker. He then returned to the UK as the music critic for The Times, then chief music critic of The Observer. He was also music editor of The Listener and editor of the journal Early Music. In 1992 he was appointed Controller, BBC Radio 3 and director of the BBC Proms from the 1996 season, his title changing in 2000 to Controller BBC Proms, Live Events and Television Classical Music. In February 2007 he was announced as the new Managing Director of the Barbican Centre in the City of London, in succession to Sir John Tusa.

Kenyon is a member of the Board of English National Opera, a Governor of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, a member of English Heritage's Blue Plaques Panel, a Trustee of the Dartington Hall Trust, a member of the Dartington International Summer School Foundation and a patron of . He is also a Fellow of The Radio Academy.^[1]

Honours[]

In the 2001 New Year Honours, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to music and millennium broadcasting.^[2] He was created a Knight Bachelor in the 2008 New Year Honours.^[3] In 2011, he was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy.^[4]

Publications[]

Amongst his publications are The BBC Symphony Orchestra: the first 50 years (1982), the biography Simon Rattle: from Birmingham to Berlin (2001), and the Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart (2005). He edited the influential Authenticity and Early Music (1987), and the BBC Proms Guides to Great Symphonies, Great Concertos, Great Choral Works and Great Orchestral works. He also wrote The Life of Music: New Adventures in the Western Classical Tradition (2021).

Media interest[]

In 2020 Kenyon commented on a controversy about whether Rule, Britannia! should be sung at the Last Night of the Proms. In recent years the inclusion of the song has been criticised because of its jingoistic words, for example by Leonard Slatkin, the second non-British person to conduct the Last Night of the Proms.^[5] In 2020 the BBC proposed to perform the tune in the Royal Albert Hall without the words, citing the difficulties the traditional arrangement posed during the pandemic. The reactions which this decision elicited included a headline in The Sunday Times that Rule Britannia faces axe in BBC’s ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’.(see note¹) Kenyon dismissed the controversy as "kneejerk" BBC bashing,^[6] but the decision not to sing the lyrics was reversed.^[7]

Notes[]

1.^ While the reference to race in the headline has itself been seen as provocative, for example by James O'Brien, given that the ostensible reason for cutting the singers was the need to keep the Proms free of Covid, a number of people discussed the issue in the context of Black Lives Matter; the music critic of The Times Richard Morrison wrote in BBC Music Magazine that "the line announcing that 'Britons never will be slaves' strikes me as unacceptable in 2020".

References[]

External links[]

• Guardian article by Kenyon on the influence of recording and broadcasting on musical tastes