Editor's Note - Today sees the launch of the 2012 BBC Proms, an eight week season spanning the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics, welcoming an international line-up of leading orchestras, conductors and soloists from the UK and around the world.

Over on the Radio 3 Blog, Roger Wright, Director BBC Proms writes,

At the heart of the Proms is the scale of the event, and it's something which puts quality and accessibility together. It is, simply, the best music festival in the world.

Roger Wright also talks about the forthcoming season, its ethos and the experience of the first night concert in this audio interview for the About the BBC blog.

• Full press information on the BBC Media Centre website.
• Full concert listings for the entire season are available on the BBC Proms website.
• Roger Wright blogs about the season on the BBC Radio 3 blog.

Editor's note: Roger Wright is Controller of BBC Radio 3 and Director of the BBC Proms. It's one of the most important days in his musical year - SB

It's the morning of the BBC Proms launch. I have a real sense of anticipation and excitement because, at last, it's possible to tell everyone about the 2011 plans.

I always feel rather unfriendly keeping the plans as secret as possible until now. We need as much publicity as possible on launch day as we have hundreds of thousands of tickets to sell and therefore want to spread the word as widely as we can. Leaks beforehand would simply drip the news out and potentially undermine the launch day splash.

In the BBC Proms team we are counting down the hours to go before the 2010 BBC Proms gets underway. For many in our audience the Proms is something that the BBC simply broadcasts, but since 1927 the BBC has run and funded the festival.

The planning for the world's largest music festival begins years ahead and so we have been looking forward to the 2010 programmes for some time!

We live in an odd Doctor Who like time warp in which we are working on urgent things for the start of this festival today and also dealing with pressing matters for future seasons as far ahead as 2014. 

The BBC Proms is a huge team effort. Although the Proms team itself is small, the co-ordination between our BBC orchestras and choirs, radio, TV and interactive colleagues is enormous.

I was amazed to look back ten years ago and see that there were less than a dozen televised Proms. This year there are almost thirty and they are on all five BBC TV channels - One, Two, Three and Four and the HD channel. As ever they are all broadcast live on Radio 3.

We are all really eager to get going and see and hear the start of Mahler's gigantic Symphony no.8 tonight.  Inevitably, with something the scale of the Proms, there is unexpected news to which we have to respond quickly.

We lost our tenor soloist for the Mahler to illness earlier in the week, but have found a terrific replacement. Yesterday we were all deeply saddened by the death of the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras - truly one of the greats of his profession.  He was due to be conducting two Proms this season and so we are dealing with replacements now.  We will dedicate a Prom to his memory - next year he would have celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his Proms debut.  His passing is an enormous blow and I know that the Promenaders will feel the loss deeply and miss seeing him and hearing his magnificent work.

September seems a long way off now - but it will no doubt rush by quickly - and we will emerge blinking at the light on September 12^th and asking why the days are suddenly so much shorter but I hope with many wonderful musical memories to treasure and a realisation that the start of the 2011 Proms is only ten months away!

Roger Wright is the Director of BBC Proms and Controller of BBC Radio 3

• Full information about BBC Proms 2010