It’s summer, which means that Londoners and visitors get to enjoy the Promenade Concerts, better known as the Proms. This year, as every time since their inception in 1895, the Proms are offering an extraordinary range of classical music, from staples to new commissions. This year, another thing stands out: the hype around super-young super maestri is fading. That’s a good thing, not least for young conductors.

The Proms are a London summer institution, and a beloved one: at the concerts I’ve attended this year (as every year), there have been very few empty seats. I’ve heard musical warhorses like Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony (the performance is available here) and Sergey Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini (that performance, featuring the Italian pianist Beatrice Rana, is available here). I’ve heard Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, Edgard Varèse’s Intégrales and still lesser-known oeuvres. I’ve heard Maurice Ravel’s perennial favourite Boléro (available here).

What I haven’t heard, though, is hype for extremely young conductors. Just a few years ago, young maestri were the rage – the younger, the better. That was the case not just at the Proms but across the world of classical music. Orchestras competed to name as their next music director a man or woman just a few years (or less) out of conservatoire. It would be unfair to name names of conductors, orchestras or conservatoires, though they’re well-known in the world of classical music.

What matters more than the conductors and orchestras involved is that the super-young-maestri rage was not really about the conductors. It was a desperate move. Across the world of classical music, orchestras, concert halls and opera houses are struggling with their role in modern society, where there are too few people knowledgeable about classical music to help the institutions fill their performances and balance their books.

For the past couple of decades, orchestras have been experimenting with different new formats. I’ve seen maestri stand in the middle of the orchestra to demonstrate the role of the orchestra’s different instrument sections before conducting the piece. I’ve seen concerts preceded by lectures about the repertoire. I’ve seen rush-hour concerts: 60-minute performances at 5pm. I’ve seen quite a few performances of famous soundtracks. The rush to appoint extremely young music directors was part of this rush to innovate. The conductors were, naturally, first-rate, but by appointing them the orchestras were also hoping to gain attention and a certain coolness factor. The appointment of a 50-year-old will hardly generate publicity; the appointment of a twentysomething will.

But publicity and attention are fleeting goods, and, after the publicity, an orchestra will have to work with a music director who – brilliant though he or she may be – lacks the experience, maturity and managerial prowess music director posts demand. ‘Famous orchestras were setting themselves up to become training ships’, one artist agent told me.

Paradoxically, the craze hasn’t been good for the conductors either. Instead of cutting their teeth with lesser ensembles, they are saddled with artistic and managerial responsibilities that will prevent them from excelling. I have seen many a review gently pointing out that this or that wunderkind would have done well waiting to conduct a certain masterpiece.

The unstoppable quest for new audiences has thus hurt older and younger conductors alike: older ones because they’ve been passed over on the basis of age alone, and younger ones because they will underperform in big jobs for which they’re not prepared.

Classical music’s dilemma is not a lack of innovative programming or PR: it’s that not enough people have encountered it somewhere in their lives. When music instruction was common in schools, classical music had an audience pipeline featuring at least part of the population. Some countries, such Germany, Finland and Latvia, still offer excellent musical education, while others, like Italy, do not. Covid-19 was another heavy blow to classical music, by definition a group activity requiring close proximity. But the desire to listen to classical music is there: according to a 2024 survey by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, between 2018 and 2023 the percentage of people (in the UK) who would like to experience an orchestral concert rose from 79 to 84.

That’s why the Proms are so important. Every evening I have seen a motley mix of people in the audience, most of whom seem to be there for the first time. Some of the conductors and performances have been electrifying, some merely excellent. But age was never the selling point: music was. And people loved it. Imagine if more cities had summer-long classical-music festivals with standing tickets at prices no one can resist.