BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

The First Night – A Child of Our Time
This concert was dedicated to the “memory of the victims of the London bombings, 7 July 2005”, and if there was a somewhat muted atmosphere amongst the audience, rather than...
Thousands to watch the Proms on big screens this Friday
Thousands are expected to watch First Night of the BBC Proms on big screens across the country this coming Friday 15 July 2005. Thirty-seven of the world’s top orchestras, three...
The Last Night of the Proms
And so to the Last Night of the Proms, one of our few remaining national rituals, no longer just a concert, more a media event. Pandering to that peculiarly English...
BBC Philharmonic
The most consistently satisfying performance came at the beginning of the concert. Dvořák’s musical depiction of an Erben ballad brought to vivid life by Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic...
Marc-Antoine Charpentier
This year sees the tercentenary of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s death, and London has already been graced with many performances of the French master’s works. Coincidentally, Les Arts Florissants are celebrating its...
Psappha
On the very day of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s 70th-birthday, the Proms offered a celebration with this late-night performance of works from his 1960s’ ‘expressionist’ phase together with a very...
Czech Philharmonic
The last major international orchestra to this year’s Proms (Les Arts Florissants and William Christie notwithstanding) was the Czech Philharmonic. It made its first visit 35 years ago, in 1969,...
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
An interesting programme mixing Kaija Saariaho’s large-scale symphonic piece Orion, inspired by the myth and the constellation of Orion in a night-time sky, and Bartók’s operatic masterpiece telling the tale...
Berliner Philharmoniker 2
For their second programme, Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic (as we're not supposed to call it) presented a typically astute pairing, unimaginable in the Karajan era though by...
Chamber Music No.8
The Concertino began well. Rolf Hind thumped out the blunt, bare opening declaration authoritatively. Martin Owen’s horn answered him sweetly, gravely and consistently. Hind, meanwhile, began to scamper pointlessly and...
Berliner Philharmoniker 1
If concert programmes had sub-titles in the way now common to every public body – you know the sort of thing, the dust-cart with a sign saying "Working for a...
Staatskapelle Dresden 2
It took until the Dvořák symphony for something truly memorable, not just of this concert but of Staatskapelle Dresden’s two Proms. The Haydn, altogether more attentive and purposeful than the...
Sur Incises
The opportunity to 'bring South' performances from the Edinburgh Festival paid off handsomely in this Prom pairing of major works by composers who were sometime colleagues. A veritable showcase, too,...
Sneaker Wave
The promenaders stayed away in droves for this one. I don’t quite understand why. It was a strange but pleasing programme that included a first performance and a couple of...
A Final Last Night
Leonard Slatkin reflects on his last Last Night of the PromsIt is hard to believe that almost four years as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra have passed. To...