BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Proms at … Cadogan Hall, PCM4 – Baroque Cello Concertos by Platti, Vivaldi & Boccherini – Edgar Moreau, Il Pomo d’Oro & Maxim Emelyanychev
The cello’s emergence from the ensemble into a solo role was the theme of Il Pomo d’Oro’s Proms programme. And so it was not surprising that Edgar Moreau shone most...
Prom 29: Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, conducted by Semyon Bychkov
It is astonishing that Mussorgsky’s unfinished history opera Khovanshchina (The Khovansky Affair) has survived to tell the tale of the political mayhem in seventeenth-century Russia created by the ultra-conservative Prince...
Prom 28: National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain/Thomas Adès – Mural, Polaris, Rite of Spring
Three Proms traditions of different vintages elided in this magnificent concert, namely the almost-annual appearance of Thomas Adès, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring....
Prom 27: Ella and Dizzy – A Centenary Tribute – Dianne Reeves, James Morrison, John Mauceri
Honouring ‘jazz greats’ has become something of a staple over recent Proms seasons, often with little reason other than to fill-out the schedule, though when it comes to Ella Fitzgerald...
Prom 26: Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen/Paavo Järvi – Erkki-Sven Tüür & Brahms – Vilde Frang & Lawrence Power play Mozart K364
It is no surprise that Erkki-Sven Tüür’s tone-poem for strings Flamma is dedicated to violinist Richard Tognetti who led the Australian Chamber Orchestra in the 2011 premiere performance and it...
Prom 25: John Eliot Gardiner conducts Heinrich Schütz & Johann Sebastian Bach – Monteverdi Choir & English Baroque Soloists
Amongst this year’s Proms foci, the five-hundredth-anniversary of Luther’s Reformation tops even the four-hundredth-and-fiftieth anniversary of Monteverdi’s birth. Both this evening’s earlier Prom (which opened with Stravinsky’s transcription of Bach’s...
Prom 24: Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra in Vom Himmel hoch & Naive and Sentimental Music – Marianne Crébassa sings Shéhérazade
In addition to the nod to the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation (explored further in the late-night concert immediately after) and John Adams’s seventieth birthday, this Prom marked the (unstated)...
Prom 23: William Christie conducts Handel’s Israel in Egypt – Choir & Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Israel in Egypt is famous – even notorious – as one of Handel’s grandest choral conceptions, with its great sweep of double choruses narrating the portentous events of the Israelites’...
Prom 22: Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin (1610) – Pygmalion/Raphaël Pichon
In bringing a work such as Monteverdi’s Vespers out of church and into concert halls entails making a decision as to whether a performance should retain an essentially liturgical character...
Proms at … Cadogan Hall, PCM3 – From the Kalevala to Kaustinen: Finnish Folk and Baroque Music
There’s no BBC-branded Prom this year (Blue Peter, Horrible Histories, Desert Island Discs...) but it struck me that Cadogan Hall’s weekly Proms Chamber Music fix is like Doctor Who’s TARDIS....
Prom 21: James MacMillan’s European Requiem & Beethoven’s Choral Symphony – BBCNOW/Xian Zhang
The programme note for Sir James MacMillan’s A European Requiem makes the point that it was composed before last year’s UK EU referendum, so that any political agenda that might...
Prom 20: BBC Philharmonic/Mark Wigglesworth – David Sawer & Joseph Haydn – Stephen Hough plays Brahms
Colin Anderson writes... With an hour to go to the start of this Prom, the designated reviewer, Antony Hodgson, contacted me to say that he was stuck in a train...
Prom 19: Relaxed Prom
Last year one of the two CBeebies Proms, this year the first Relaxed Prom – I seem to have become the Classical Source fall-back “kids’ Prom” reviewer since my seven-year-old...
Prom 18: Sea Hawk, Sirens, Scheherazade – BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Gaffigan
The sea in various forms provided the linking thread for this programme, which otherwise demonstrated in one particular respect the schismatic failures of the relatively newly-constituted BBC Music department.This year’s...
Prom 17: Mark Simpson’s The Immortal & Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony – BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena
It is so unfair. Mark Simpson, now in his late-twenties, is prodigiously gifted. Not only is he a BBC Young Musician of the Year clarinettist who really knows how to...
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