BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Proms at … Bold Tendencies Multi-Storey Car Park, Peckham – Multi-Story Orchestra/Christopher Stark – Bach/Bantock, Kate Whitley, John Adams’s Harmonielehre
A bijou encapsulation about what the Proms is all about, albeit with a shift some six miles south-east from the Royal Albert Hall, a return to the Bold Tendencies Multi-Storey...
Prom 55: Classical Music of India and Pakistan
Curated by the Darbar Foundation, this long late-night Prom (extending into Saturday morning) celebrated the seventieth-anniversary of the ending of colonial rule in India, the creation of the modern states...
Prom 54: La Scala Philharmonic/Riccardo Chailly – Respighi’s Pines and Fountains of Rome – Leonidas Kavakos plays Brahms’s Violin Concerto
In an age when a short piece to open a concert is no longer the regular presence it once was – whether specifically an Overture or not, even though there...
Prom 53: Beneath the Underdog – Charles Mingus Revisited
Beneath the Underdog proved a powerful Proms showcase of Charles Mingus’s radical repertoire, performed with bold attitude by Jules Buckley and his Metropole Orkest. Buckley was joined by a charismatic...
Prom 52: Beyond the Score® – Dvořák’s New World Symphony – Henry Goodman, Hallé, Mark Elder
Gerald McBurney – described in his biography as composer, writer and deviser – stepped down last year after a decade as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s artistic programming advisor. During that...
Prom 51 – Sakari Oramo conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius & Elgar-Payne – Javier Perianes plays Saint-Saëns
That both of Elgar’s completed Symphonies were heard at the start of this Proms season (Barenboim) meant the ‘Third’ was a logical inclusion. Almost two decades on from its high-profile...
Prom 50: CBSO/Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla – Leonore No.3 & Beethoven’s Fifth, Leila Josefowicz plays Stravinsky, and Allan Clayton premieres Gerald Barry’s Canada
There were times when I thought that Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s Beethoven, particularly in the Fifth Symphony, was too much of a good thing in its drive and tension, but there was...
Proms at … Cadogan Hall, PCM6 – Christiane Karg & Malcolm Martineau
It might seem perverse to single out the only non-native composer from a recital given over largely to French song, but if one had to pick a highlight from Christiane...
Prom 49: Reformation Day 3 – J. S. Bach’s St John Passion with the Dunedin Ensemble and John Butt
J. S. Bach’s St John Passion formed the culmination of this tripartite “Reformation Day” at the Proms, celebrating the five-hundredth-anniversary of that pivotal event in history – a work which...
Prom 48: Reformation Day 2 – A Patchwork Passion – BBC Singers & City of London Sinfonia conducted by Sofi Jeannin
For the second instalment of the Proms’ “Reformation Day” John Butt wove together a fascinating sequence of excerpts, in more or less chronological order, from settings of the narrative of...
Prom 47: Reformation Day 1 – Bach’s Little Organ Book past and present – Robert Quinney & William Whitehead at Royal Albert Hall organ
Although the religious revolution spawned in Europe exactly five-hundred years ago by Martin Luther’s challenge to the theology and practices of the Roman Catholic Church has come to be described...
Prom 46: Simon Rattle conducts the LSO in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, with Simon O’Neill, Eva-Maria Westbroek, Karen Cargill, Christopher Purves, Peter Hoare, Thomas Quasthoff
What is it about doomed lovers and the inexorable progress towards a New Music? First Tristan und Isolde, then Pelléas et Mélisande, and, almost as though he wanted to have...
Prom 45: Sakari Oramo conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, dedicated to the memory of Jiří Bělohlávek
Before he and the BBC Symphony Orchestra launched Mahler’s first movement (entitled Totenfeier in its original stand-alone guise), Sakari Oramo made a brief speech dedicating this Prom ‘Resurrection’ Symphony to...
Prom 44: Bang on a Can All-Stars – Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen
There were more than the usual stage changes, necessitating the removal of five sets of seats around the stalls, to prepare for Bang on a Can’s thirtieth-anniversary Prom. This was...
Prom 43: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – Charles Dutoit conducts Falla’s El amor brujo & Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony – Joshua Bell plays Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole
It seems impossible that Charles Dutoit is now eighty, and not far short from turning eighty-one; as lithe as ever he conducted his tenth Prom (only one of those in...
Skip to content