BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Prom 4: BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena – Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony – Mark Simpson plays Magnus Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto
Magnus Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto, written for Kari Kriikku in 2002 (he gave its Proms premiere five years later, under Semyon Bychkov), is one of those masterworks that transcends place and...
Proms at … Cadogan Hall 1/Proms Chamber Music – Calidore String Quartet & Javier Perianes – Caroline Shaw’s Essays & Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet
Schumann's Piano Quintet should have been the highlight of this lunchtime Prom, the first of eight this season marking one-hundred years since women in the UK were given the right...
Prom 3: BBC Young Musician 40th Anniversary
How do you celebrate an institution’s fortieth-birthday, which has elicited not only twenty-one winners but also a hinterland of talented others? That’s the problem faced by the Proms to mark...
Prom 2: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Alain Altinoglu – Fauré’s Pavane & Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé – Francesco Piemontesi plays Mozart K595
No doubt Charles Dutoit was originally in the driving seat for this Prom, but step forward Alain Altinoglu who led the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a vividly theatrical performance of...
First Night of the Proms 2018 – Sakari Oramo conducts BBCSO in Oliver Knussen’s Flourish with Fireworks, VW’s Toward the Unknown Region, Holst’s The Planets, and Anna Meredith’s Five Telegrams
Braving a thunderstorm and sundry demonstrations, a near-capacity crowd assembled for 2018’s First Night of the BBC Proms, timed to begin at the implausible hour of 8.15. Was that to...
Alan Davey’s Proms Blog
David Pickard, the Proms team and I are very proud of the broad and exciting range of concerts we have packed into eight weeks of music-making at the 2018 BBC...
Last Night of the Proms 2017 conducted by Sakari Oramo
After fifty-eight days and some ninety concerts, we’re back to another Last Night. How did that happen? There was still some unfinished business, tidied up – in the nick of...
Prom 74: Vienna Philharmonic – Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Brahms & Beethoven – Emanuel Ax plays Mozart K449
Whether the Vienna Philharmonic sounds as it once recognisably did, in days of yore, is a moot point, but in this second of two consecutive Proms for 2017, this time...
Prom 73: András Schiff plays Book One of J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier
Any aspiring keyboard player knows of marvels that can unfold just by taking on any one of J. S. Bach’s ‘48’ Preludes and Fugues, and here was András Schiff embarking...
Prom 72: Vienna Philharmonic – Daniel Harding conducts Mahler 6
Not for the first time the Vienna Philharmonic is giving two consecutive Proms under guest conductors neither of whom enjoys quite the legendary reputation of the ensemble itself. That said,...
Proms at … The Tanks at Tate Modern
When Sara Mohr-Pietsch tells you that you may walk around so as to “curate your own listening experience”, it’s a sure sign that you’re in the rarefied air of arty...
Prom 71: London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski – Funeral Song … Volga Boatmen … Russian Funeral … The Year 1905 – Alina Ibragimova plays Prokofiev
This London Philharmonic Prom opened with the lost-and-found Funeral Song (see link below), written in 1908 by Stravinsky to honour the deceased Rimsky-Korsakov. It had a performance in January 1909,...
Prom 70: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Karina Canellakis – Missy Mazzoli & Dvořák – Jeremy Denk plays Bartók
Nestled between a sequence of five concerts from overseas orchestras and a run up to the Last Night of the Proms, two evenings from the Vienna Philharmonic and András Schiff’s...
Prom 69: Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck – John Adams’s Lollapalooza & Mahler 1 – Anne-Sophie Mutter plays Dvořák
The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, currently embarked on another of its whirlwind tours of Europe’s top music festivals, returned to the Proms for its twelfth visit with a very special guest...
Proms at … Cadogan Hall, PCM8 – Elias String Quartet & Alice Neary play Schubert’s String Quintet
So sensitive was this interpretation that it would be unfair to suggest that it was understated but the gentle, often poignant refinement of Schubert’s beautiful melodies was sometimes made at...
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