BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Prom 54 – Mozart Clarinet Concerto (with Ákos Ács) and Requiem – Collegium Vocale Gent & Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer
The singing soloist in Mozart’s Concert Aria, Per questa bella mano, and also later in the Requiem, was Hanno Müller-Brachmann, triumphantly replacing the indisposed Neal Davies. The Aria, with its...
Prom 53 – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko – Torus & Rachmaninov 3 – Alexey Stadler plays Shostakovich; Composers in Conversation: Emily Howard
The evening began with an engaging and illuminating conversation between Andrew McGregor and Emily Howard, in preparation for the first outing of her Torus. This born-1979 composer from Liverpool, with...
Prom 52: São Paulo Late-Night Brazilian/Marin Alsop
And so to the “carnival” atmosphere of Brazilian popular music; from the audience, less than a handful moved at all, let alone in time to the music. Two made some...
Prom 51: São Paulo Symphony Orchestra/Marin Alsop – Nobre’s Kabbalah, Villa-Lobos, Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances – Gabriela Montero plays Grieg
The São Paolo Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop flew the Brazilian flag unashamedly on their two-Prom night.Marlos Nobre (born 1939) is a prolific composer, everything except opera. Kabbalah (2004) is...
Prom 50: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Alexander Vedernikov – Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet & Prokofiev 3 – Stephen Hough plays Paganini Rhapsody
Of Tchaikovsky’s musical takes on Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet is the gold standard, whereas The Tempest and Hamlet are less consistently inspired if full of good things. However, the latter,...
Prom 49: Quincy Jones Prom – Metropole Orkest/Jules Buckley with Richard Bona, Jacob Collier, Laura Mvula, Alfredo Rodríguez, Cory Henry
If Quincy Jones is not among the greatest artistic figures of the post-war era, he is assuredly one of the most versatile. Just how versatile was the concept underlying this...
Proms Chamber Music 6: Louis Lortie plays Rossini, Poulenc, Fauré and Liszt – Venezia e Napoli
This beautifully crafted programme, built carefully from a request to Louis Lortie to include some Rossini, interweaved musical references to Venice and Naples in an inventive and wholly satisfactory way.Lortie,...
Prom 48 – Reflections on Narcissus & A Midsummer Night’s Dream – BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Matthias Pintscher with Alisa Weilerstein
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s Artist-in-Association, Matthias Pintscher, is no stranger to acting as composer-conductor at the Proms. Here, the piece was Reflections on Narcissus (2005), a 35-minute work for...
Prom 47: Ulster Orchestra/Rafael Payare – Piers Hellawell’s Wild Flow & Tchaikovsky 5 – Narek Hakhnazaryan plays Haydn
“No matter what you do, someone, somewhere will complain” – so runs the old adage, and whilst no single Proms season can please everyone, there is no doubt in my...
Prom 46: Grisey’s Dérives, Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder with Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, Mozart’s Mass in C minor – Ilan Volkov conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra & the BBC Symphony Chorus
Unless Ilan Volkov had suddenly decided to play the opening work half-speed (or perhaps, Oliver Knussen-like, repeat it complete), the listing in the Proms Guide of Gérard Grisey’s Dérives proved...
Proms at … Roundhouse – Birtwistle, Haas, Levi, Sawer, Greenwood, Ligeti – London Sinfonietta/Andrew Gourlay with Jonathan Morton
Surrounded by Ron Arad’s Curtain Call (polymer rods defining a circular space inside the Roundhouse) the BBC Proms renewed a 45-year-old association with this venue, where from 1971 there were...
Prom 45: Janáček’s The Makropulos Case – Karita Mattila, Gustáv Beláček, Aleš Briscein, Svatopluk Sem – BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek
Fond thoughts of Raymond Gubbay sprang to mind more than once during this Proms performance of Janáček’s autumnal masterpiece, The Makropulos Case. Over the years the populist impresario has solved...
Prom 44: Shakespeare on Stage and Screen – BBC Concert Orchestra/Keith Lockhart – including Richard III, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, West Side Story, The Boys from Syracuse
Shakespeare is not just the most-performed playwright for the stage but also the most filmed author for the screen. A well-devised Proms programme showed this variety with a British first...
Prom 43: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Daniel Barenboim – Widmann & Wagner – Martha Argerich plays Liszt
The Royal Albert Hall was packed on one of the hottest days of the year and it was a full house in other ways too. Daniel Barenboim’s health may or...
Prom 42: Johann Sebastian Bach & Arvo Pärt – The Sixteen/Harry Christophers
J. S. Bach and Arvo Pärt both seek to capture the sacred and divine realm in their choral music but they do so by very contrasting means. Where Bach calls...
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