BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Proms Chamber Music 1: Debussy’s Cello Sonata, Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit & Mozart K414 – Bjørg Lewis & Paul Lewis; Vertavo String Quartet
The first Proms Chamber Music concert at Cadogan Hall during the 2016 season was certainly not short of substance with three major works.This auspicious opening recital included Debussy’s Cello Sonata,...
Prom 3: Haydn’s Mass in Time of War … Fauré’s Requiem – Choir of King’s College Cambridge & OAE/Stephen Cleobury
Here was a world-famous Cambridge Choir singing Haydn and Fauré with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. So what’s not to like? On the surface not much, but occasionally,...
Prom 2: The Royal Opera – Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov – Bryn Terfel; conducted by Antonio Pappano
This may have been only the second Prom of the 2016 season but surely it provided the first climax. The Royal Opera House brought its recent production of Mussorgsky’s original...
Prom 1: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo – Romeo and Juliet, Alexander Nevsky – Sol Gabetta plays Elgar’s Cello Concerto
The BBC Proms 2016 season opened with a stirring mark of respect as regards the atrocity that had occurred twenty-four hours earlier in Nice. ‘La Marseillaise’, played with honour by...
Alan Davey – Controller BBC Radio 3 – Classical Source Blog
It’s that time of year again – the time of year when the musical world turns its attention to South Kensington and the Royal Albert Hall with the thousands of...
Prom-tiddly-Prom-Prom – Nick Breckenfield reveals his Top Ten BBC Proms for the 2016 season, which opens on Friday July 15
Charged with choosing ten highlights from this year’s Proms schedule, I’m going to cheat ... so expect more than ten concerts, but there will be the ten best strands.There’s a...
Prom 76: Marin Alsop conducts The Last Night of the Proms with Benjamin Grosvenor, Jonas Kaufmann and Danielle de Niese – Puccini Arias, I bought me a cat, Land of Hope and Glory, Jerusalem, Rule Britannia!, Auld Lang Syne
Dedicated to a “just, moderate and peaceful society” – as per Marin Alsop’s second-half speech – the Last Night of the Proms 2015 accentuated a transatlantic flavour that included music...
Prom 75: Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (2) – Simon Rattle conducts Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with Toby Spence, Roderick Williams, Magdalena Kožená, and the BBC Proms Youth Choir
It was not until 1957 that The Dream of Gerontius reached the Proms unabridged, a development associated with the arrival as chief conductor in 1948 of Malcolm Sargent who was...
Prom 74: Wireless Nights Prom With Jarvis Cocker
The last in this Season’s late-night Proms collaborations was an ambitious undertaking. Jarvis Cocker’s Radio 4 programme Wireless Nights, featuring the nocturnal habits and musings of the British public, came...
Prom 73: Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (1) – Semyon Bychkov conducts Symphonies by Brahms and Franz Schmidt
This first of the Vienna Philharmonic’s Proms was of two Symphonies – the first a staple of the repertoire, the second being still unfamiliar outside of Austria. At the helm...
Prom 72: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Litton – Nielsen’s Springtime on Funen and, with Henning Kraggerud, the Violin Concerto, and Charles Ives’s Symphony No.4
The Nielsen element at this year’s Proms concluded with two pieces still to make a wider impact outside Denmark. With the cantata Springtime on Funen (1921), the range (not size)...
Prom 71 – St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra/Yuri Temirkanov (2) – The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh & Enigma Variations – Julia Fischer plays Tchaikovsky
Yuri Temirkanov must be one of the most unpredictable conductors on the international circuit and I am not referring to his unfortunate remarks about the plausibility of women conductors. Unlike...
Prom 70 – St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra/Yuri Temirkanov (1) – Francesca da Rimini & Scheherazade – Nikolai Lugansky plays Rachmaninov
The first of the St Petersburg Philharmonic’s two Proms was a sell-out, not surprisingly since it contained two of the most popular works in the repertory, the Rachmaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov’s...
PCM8: Benedetti Elschenbroich Grynyuk Trio – Brahms’s Opus 8 & Arlene Sierra’s Butterflies Remember a Mountain
With Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach still ringing majestically in my ears from Saturday night, I did wonder how I’d take to another cellist so soon, especially as the cello takes the...
Prom 69: BBC Concert Orchestra/Keith Lockhart with Alison Balsom – Danse macabre, premiere of Guy Barker’s The Lanterne of Light, Carmina Burana
This eighth Free Prom, opening the gateway to classical music for anyone new to it, was programmatically a triumph even if it was comparatively ordinary when judged against others from...
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