To fill the hall during the heat of the late-summer period, when London audiences tended to stay away from theatres and concert halls, Newman planned to run a ten-week season of promenade concerts, with low-priced tickets to attract a wider audience than that of the main season. Costs needed to be kept down, and Newman decided not to engage a star conductor, but invited the young and little known Henry Wood to conduct the whole season. There had been various seasons of promenade concerts in London since 1838, under conductors from Louis Antoine Jullien to Arthur Sullivan. Sullivan's concerts in the 1870s had been particularly successful because he offered his audiences something more than the usual light music. He introduced major classical works, such as Beethoven symphonies, normally restricted to the more expensive concerts presented by the Philharmonic Society and others. Newman aimed to do the same: "I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music".