The Art of Conducting 2012

The BBC Proms are steeped in traditions, many admirable, some arcane, the odd one ever so slightly maddening. In the short life of The Arts Desk - we turned three on Sunday, the day after the 2012 Proms season came to a close - another tradition has come into being. Every year we publish a gallery of portraits of conductors at work. These astonishing photographs are all by Chris Christodoulou, who has been capturing the Proms in pictures for 31 years.

These, it should be stated, are the images which are very much not released for use by the press after each Prom. And you can see why. They find conductors in a state of unvarnished passion, committed to communication but seen in perhaps less flattering light than they may wish. Christodoulou snaps them at the very moment their eyes are at their buggiest, their hair at its wildest, their face at its most gurning. For most of us conducting is a rarefied art whose finer subtleties, for all the efforts of the TV show Maestro to explain it, is sometimes difficult to grasp. These pictures say what a conductor does better than words ever can.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Prom 3

John Adams, Prom 4

Sakari Oramo, Prom 6

Daniel Barenboim, Prom 10

Sir Antonio Pappano, Prom 11

Jiří Bělohlávek, Prom 15

Ryan Wrigglesworth, Prom 16

Thomas Dausgaard, Prom 19

Juanjo Mena, Prom 33

Thierry Fischer, Prom 39

Marin Alsop, Prom 45

Andrew Manze, Prom 46

Vladimir Jurowski, Prom 48

Andris Nelsons, Prom 51

Valery Gergiev, Prom 52

Vasily Petrenko, Prom 54

Edward Gardner, Prom 55

Daniele Gatti, Prom 57

John Wilson, Prom 59

Martyn Brabbins, Prom 61

Sir Simon Rattle, Prom 64

Guy Barker, Prom 65

Riccardo Chailly, Prom 67

Keith Lockhart, Prom 70

David Robertson, Prom 71