Yorkshire has never been especially shy about making its presence felt.
This summer, however, the county is going to be doing it with a full symphony orchestra, two substantial choirs and several hundred people encouraged to sing their hearts out inside one of Britain’s oldest concert halls.
The first-ever Yorkshire Proms comes to Bradford’s St George’s Hall on Saturday 1 August - Yorkshire Day, naturally - with its organisers hoping to establish a major new annual cultural tradition for the region.
The Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra will be joined by Bradford Festival Choral Society and Bantam of the Opera, the choir formed by supporters of Bradford City AFC. Together, they'll present an evening of classical music, regional stories, folk heritage and unapologetic audience participation.
It's being described as Yorkshire’s answer to the Last Night of the Proms - although anyone familiar with the county may suspect the word answer is being used rather politely.
The ambition isn't merely to recreate a London institution at a northern address. Instead, the concert aims to explore Yorkshire’s own musical inheritance while offering a broader picture of what contemporary northern identity might sound like: orchestral, communal, historic and still evolving.
Conducted by Yorkshire-born composer and conductor Ben Crick, the programme is set to move between cinematic works, rediscovered pieces and familiar Proms favourites, before culminating in a celebration of the county’s folk traditions.
The audience won't be permitted to remain anonymous in the darkness for long, either. Massed singing and public participation are central to the evening, with organisers promising to turn St George’s Hall into what they describe as a “roaring engine of massed local voices”.
That might be precisely the point. Yorkshire’s cultural identity has never belonged solely to professional stages, concert halls or established institutions. It lives just as readily in brass bands, football terraces, community choirs, working men’s clubs, chapels, folk songs and the stubborn local belief that anything worth doing is probably worth doing loudly.
The Yorkshire Proms brings some of those traditions together in a particularly Bradford fashion.
Bradford Festival Choral Society carries a long and distinguished history within British choral music. Alongside it, Bantam of the Opera represents something newer and gloriously less conventional: a 40-strong choir of Bradford City supporters formed during Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture.
Since then, the choir has performed for King Charles III, appeared at BBC Sports Personality of the Year and sung at the FA Cup Final - proof, maybe, that the journey from the Kop to the concert platform isn't quite as unlikely as it sounds.
For Crick, the evening is intended as both celebration and statement: “We are celebrating Yorkshire’s voice, talent and identity - past, present and future,” he said.
“Why on earth should classical music fans feel compelled to flock to the Last Night of the Proms in London, when the very best of Yorkshire is delivering a feast of music right here in West Yorkshire that will be just as good, if not better?”
It is a characteristically Yorkshire challenge: enthusiastic, confident and not noticeably burdened by false modesty.
But beneath the regional chest-beating there is a serious argument. Major cultural moments don't always have to arrive from elsewhere. They can be created here, using northern musicians, northern venues and communities with deep local roots. St George’s Hall itself opened in 1853 and remains one of the country’s oldest concert halls - an appropriate setting for an event attempting to connect heritage with a more open, participatory idea of classical music.
The event is being organised by the Yorkshire Society, which hopes the Proms will become a permanent fixture in the national arts calendar.
Its chief executive, Philip Bell, argues that the combination of professional musicians and community performers captures something essential about modern Yorkshire.
“This isn’t a passive, elitist spectacle,” he said. “It is a massive, inclusive celebration designed to involve communities from every corner of our county.”
Bell also makes the less romantic - but no less important - point that new cultural traditions need audiences willing to support them.
“Cultural traditions of this scale cannot survive on goodwill alone,” he said. “Our public must step forward, buy their tickets and actively support our local, world-class musical talent.”
That's obviously important. Across the North, organisations frequently talk about creating ambitious cultural programmes outside London. Yet those ambitions can only survive when audiences, funders and institutions treat northern cultural life not as a peripheral extra, but as something worth sustained investment.
The Yorkshire Proms might arrive wrapped in white roses, civic pride and a healthy quantity of pomp and circumstance. But it also represents something more valuable: a belief that the region can create its own grand occasions rather than waiting to be invited into somebody else’s.
And, on Yorkshire Day, Bradford will be doing exactly that.
Preferably at full volume.
Header image: Clear Water, Bradford City Centre. (SA Khan Photography)
