BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Prom 41: 20th August 2001 – Late Night Sinfonietta
Taking on a late-night Prom this season, Oliver Knussen came up with an enterprising, if oddly constituted programme which served several commemorative purposes.The exception to this was Kenneth Hesketh’s The...
Prom 40: 20th August 2001 – Schoenberg Premiere
Programme-wise, this was the most revealing concert so far this season. The three main works all represent the ’symphonic tradition’ at its most recreative and uncompromising, even though only one...
Prom Chamber Music 5: 20th August 2001- Amazing Aimard
Having already delighted Proms audiences with his fearless and peerless assumption of Messiaen’s piano solo in Turangalîla just over a week earlier (Prom 29), French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard was back...
Prom 39: 19th August 2001 – CBSO
For his third Prom at the helm of the CBSO, Sakari Oramo directed a programme that worked better ’in the flesh’ than on paper. Maybe a curtain-raiser before the Dvorák...
Prom 38: 18th August 2001 – Salve, Sidus Polonorum
It was good to hear the BBC Symphony Chorus given something worthier of its talents than Sally Beamish’s piece, which I reviewed earlier this season (Prom 12). The Chorus is...
Prom 36: 17th August 2001
2001, in the ’Space Odyssey’ sense, is one of numerous semi-themes running through this year’s Proms, though Kubrick’s often visionary perspective on the future of humanity hardly accords with the...
Prom 35: 16th August 2001 – Fidelio
As Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio has always enjoyed the caché of articulating his convictions - of liberty, equality and verity - in the most direct and immediate terms. Of course,...
Prom 34: 15th August 2001 – Foreign Bodies
The conductor who is also a composer is something of a suspicious breed. It would be a brave soul who claimed that figures such as Previn or Maazel (or Klemperer...
Prom 33: 14th August 2001 – Klezmer & Gypsy Music
After last year’s disaster of an ’ethnic’ Prom, “Cuban Night” (with truly atrocious amplification), which attempted to persuade us that a boy-band, Vocal Sampling, was the epitome of the fantastic...
Prom 32: 14th August 2001 – Hollywood’s Golden Age
Rarely – if ever – has the encore come first in a concert. But as he raised his baton (in his left-hand) for his Proms debut, 79-year-old Elmer Bernstein started...
Prom Composer Profile: 13th August 2001 Esa-Pekka Salonen
Following portraits of James MacMillan (see review of Prom 8) and John Tavener, with John Adams to come (6 September), this focus on Salonen the composer was welcome, and not...
Prom Chamber Music 4: 13th August 2001
With the 50th anniversary of Schoenberg’s death being marked in some depth at this year’s Proms, what better than to turn one of the weekly Proms Chamber Music recitals into...
Prom 30: 12th August 2001
Without wishing to infer the ’Boulez is God’ epithet still often encountered, it can be said that a Boulez premiere is an event. In the case of the orchestral Notations,...
Prom 29: 11th August 2001 – Marvellous Messiaen
The annual visit to the Proms by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain – now in its fifty-third year – is always an occasion for wonderment. Unlike the great...
Prom 28: 10th August 2001
Those surveying the programme of tonight’s concert may have been put in mind of the three-part Proms that were a regular feature of the late Sir William Glock’s era. In...