BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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The musicians of Les Siècles pride themselves on having an instrument for every occasion, something commensurate with the timbres of the era that a piece was written, and there were...
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Serendipitously programmed (there was no mention in the Proms Guide, nor in the meagre programme) for the exact seventieth-anniversary of Indian Independence (and Partition), Passages was the 1990 east-meets-west collaboration...
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This was a concert of variable quality. It began with a somewhat disappointing account of Brahms’s Tragic Overture – disappointing in terms of basic pulse and of execution. Essentially, Robin...
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At around fifty minutes, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Hibiki stands as one of the most substantial (along with the purely orchestral Speranza of 2012) of his concert works in the past two...
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Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues and his Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets both date from that period in the early-1950s when the composer was still trying to get back into...
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Following its brief contributions to Prom 37 earlier in the evening, the twenty-four-piece Latvian Radio Choir and Sigvards Kļava returned to the Royal Albert Hall for Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, sometimes...
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This Prom reflected on the link between Russian Orthodox chant and the music of Rachmaninov. Although the composer wasn’t particularly religious, he did compose several sacred choral works – most...
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Not your usual concatenation of random classics though Thomas Dausgaard might perhaps have considered giving us Brian Newbould’s completion of the Schubert. Making his first Proms appearance as chief conductor...
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For its first “Proms at …” outing in London this season (the previous concert in the sequence of four had been in Hull), the focus turned not as far east...