BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

A Faust Symphony
Brahms and Liszt make for a pertinent coupling even outside the domain of cockney rhyming slang, and so it proved. Not that the performance of Brahms's Violin Concerto was exactly...
Strip
The BBC Symphony Orchestra was back at the Proms, not with Conductor Laureate Sir Andrew Davis, who was unwell, but Joseph Swensen. Morgan Hayes graduated from the Guildhall School of...
Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
Post EUYO concert, with the vehemence of Walton’s First Symphony cooled by Elgar’s Sospiri, the Royal Albert Hall filled again – as many people, if not more, in the Arena...
European Union Youth Orchestra
The glossy brochure explained to the audience all that needed to be known about the make-up and aspirations of the European Union Youth Orchestra. On the assumption of the brochures’...
Handel’s Julius Caesar
Something for everyone in this Broadway-to-Bollywood, all-singing, all-dancing "Giulio Cesare" direct from Glyndebourne? Well, almost. Once you get past the colonial India costumes, excessive choreographic demands on the vocalists and...
Grimaud & Haitink
As I looked through the programme for this concert, I had a disconcerting sense of déjà vu. Surely Haitink isn’t conducting Shostakovich 8 again already? Haven’t the LSO played it...
Proms Chamber Music – 6 (Andrew Kennedy & Paul Crossley)
It had to happen – a grey day with spots of rain as I headed to Cadogan Hall. But still, without sun streaming through the high windows, the hall looks...
Eternal Longing
They say a week is a long time in politics. The same might be said of music. After Jiří Bělohlávek splendid Mahler 9 with the Scottish National Orchestra at the...
The Light of the End
Commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and first performed by it under Kurt Masur in April 2003, The Light of the End is undoubtedly one of Sofia Gubaidulina's more dramatic...
Hamartia
The Scottish Ensemble has its origins in the Scottish Baroque Ensemble founded in 1969. A string group, it consists of 15 players, only two of whom are male. Clio Gould,...
Tippett 4 & Eroica
Beethoven made a profound impression on Tippett and his music, and the pairing of these two composers, although familiar, remains a potent one.Sir Colin Davis has led a significant number...
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
New Zealand, as a nation, has always punched well above its weight. The population of just four million people, a little over half that of London, has produced world leaders...
Arvo Pärt, Plainchant, Pérotin
It was an interesting idea to couple works by Arvo Pärt with the plainchant and medieval music which has inspired and informed his output since 1976, when he discovered a...
Lulu & Mahler 4
Alban Berg did not live to complete his second and final opera, “Lulu”. Given the climate in mid-1930s Germany, he almost certainly sensed the impossibility of having has work staged....
Marc-André Dalbavie
There is almost certainly more music around than we actually need, as Alexander Goehr has observed. Even if you restrict yourself to that segment of the continuum of music referred...