BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
The Pittsburgh Symphony should have been in the company of Sir Andrew Davis, the Orchestra’s Artistic Advisor. Illness (and surgery) forced Davis out of the first leg of the PSO’s...
Messages for the Queen of Sheba … Leningrad Symphony
Although the Arena was well-filled, this concert sold disappointingly in the stalls and in the seats higher up. A shame, for this was one of the great Proms of the...
More Mozart!
Can one have too much Mozart? Two full concerts on two consecutive nights is as good a test as any and the answer would seem to be that Mozart is...
Crushing Twister
The concert was devised to exhibit the successful, sustained presence of the jazz idiom in works of a classical stamp. Charles Hazelwood introduced the pieces, making it quite clear why...
Leopold String Trio & Friends
Each of the Bach arrangements was preceded by an introduction written in a totally different style – both possibly by Mozart. The voices of the fugues had been distributed among...
Mozart’s Requiem
The announcement of a ‘First performance at the Proms’ of a work by Mozart is certainly not an everyday occurrence. In the event, some explanation is necessary – what Philippe...
NDR Symphony Orchestra
The Hamburg-based NDR Symphony Orchestra was formed in the early post-World War II days and has, almost since that time, been an ensemble of real quality and of national importance...
Sculpture
Magnus Lindberg is exceptionally busy at the moment. He had flown in from New York having attended the world premiere of his Violin Concerto and settled down to play his...
Minnesota Orchestra
The Minnesota Orchestra achieved some fame during the 1950s and 1960s as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, through its exposure on the Mercury LP label. At that time the orchestra sounded...
A Relic of Memory
For a composer who has written as much music as Mark-Anthony Turnage, choral works have been noticeably scarce in his catalogue; indeed what little there was prior to “A Relic...
Frankenstein!!
This was to be “A Night of Musical Subversion”. The programme note telling us so rambled through several examples of what the title might imply, concluding that the evening exemplified...
Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra
Although the Arena was well populated there was a surprisingly small seated audience for a concert that included a popular tone poem, an appearance by Susan Graham, and a symphony...
The Confession of Isobel Gowdie
Something of a pivotal concert in terms of the LSO and Sir Colin Davis: the Elgar has already been documented on LSO Live and the Berlioz and MacMillan pieces feature...
La Simphonie du Marais
A programme billed as “reviving the music of Lully and his contemporaries and lifting the curtain on the intimate world of music devised for Louis XIV’s private entertainment.”One could argue...
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Concert performances of operas, by which I mean performances with a line-up of soloists rather than a semi-staged recreation of a production, can sometimes be rather curious affairs that bring...