BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

John Adams
Three distinct 'flavours' permeated this most interesting Prom, starting with a slice of this year’s 'East meets West' theme. La vallée des cloches is the last movement of Ravel's Miroirs,...
Late-night Choral
One of the pleasures of late-night Proms is hearing a miscellany of works whose stylistic divergence throws up unforeseen connections and similarities. Thus it was this here, with Stephen Jackson...
The English Concert
This Prom, thoughtfully composed by Andrew Manze, comprised Handel’s most luxuriantly Coronation Anthem, written for King George II, three virtuoso arias from Thomas Arne’s opera Artaxerxes, Bach’s essay in affective...
Hänsel und Gretel
Whether by accident or design, it was an apt bit of scheduling to place Engelbert Humperdinck's fairy-tale opera on the evening following a performance of Wagner's Das Rheingold. To hear,...
Das Rheingold
This was, apparently, the first performance in modern times of a complete Wagner opera using 'period' instruments, and the beginning of a four-season Proms Ring cycle to be performed by...
Henze 10
A relative lack of new commissions in main-evening Proms this year has thrown greater emphasis on recent works brought to the Albert Hall by visiting artists. The UK premiere of...
Birtwistle & Brendel
A memorable, rather special evening, the Harrison Birtwistle portrait a notable part, the climax being Alfred Brendel’s final engagement at the Proms. He’s not retiring; simply he no longer wishes...
Gergiev
Not everyone can see the point of Valery Gergiev, certainly not those who equate great music-making with maximal textual fidelity or textural elucidation. Sviatoslav Richter for one was mystified by...
Chamber Music No.5
By far the most interesting of the three Silk Road Project concerts, this intimate Chamber Music Prom was introduced in her usually infectious vein by Stephanie Hughes with the added...
B minor Mass
It was interesting to read in the ‘Further listening and reading’ section of the programme that Sir John Eliot Gardiner's recording of the Mass in B minor is considered “middle-of-the-road”....
Music of the Silk Road
“From its birth before Christ, through the heights of the Tang dynasty, until its slow demise six to seven hundred years ago, the Silk Road has had a unique role...
(Half) Viennese Night
Concerts like this are the bread and butter of BBC Concert Orchestra repertoire, the nation-wide “Friday night is music night” compilation, quality light music. This Prom found the ensemble more...
On Marking Marginally Important Occasions
Leonard Slatkin celebrates his 60th birthday with a Prom concertSeptember 1 has been sitting on my calendar for some time now. On that date, I will turn 60 years old....
Turangalîla
Billed as the London Sinfonietta, the orchestra for this performance would have been better called ‘London Sinfoniettas’ as there were three or four times the number of players you usually...
Mi-parti
Bathed in the curious dappled lighting that has plagued us this season, this vaguely Baltic programme attracted a relatively small crowd which included a mobile phone user, several influenza victims...