BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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Prom 35: John Wilson conducts Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! [evening performance]
It would be easy to write numerous superlatives and stop there. Oklahoma! was indeed excellent – the John Wilson Orchestra honed into an ensemble that comes to musicals as an...
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Prom 34: John Wilson conducts Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! [matinee performance]
Oh what a beautiful musical! Not a Proms first (there had been a concert version given in 2002, marking Richard Rodgers’s centenary, with Maureen Lipman reprising her award-winning National Theatre...
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Prom 33: BBC Philharmonic/John Storgårds – Peer Gynt, Karelia Suite, Mathis der Maler – Lise Davidsen sings Sibelius’s Luonnotar & Alban Gerhardt plays Schumann’s Cello Concerto
A welcome Prom of great music, only a couple of the pieces being heard these days with the frequency they deserve, and all given with the essential qualities needed for...
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Prom 32: Ballad of Heroes, Purcell/Elgar, Enigma Variations, Leonard Elschenbroich premieres Brian Elias’s Cello Concerto – BBCNOW/Ryan Wigglesworth
This was the last of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s five Proms for this year, and its stylish playing has been a highlight of the season so far.The programme...
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Prom 31: John Eliot Gardiner conducts Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust
The Faust legend is one of those stories that, since the Renaissance, has never stopped giving. Of its various musical manifestations, including those by Gounod, Boito, Mahler and Busoni, Berlioz’s...
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Prom 30: Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Kirill Karabits – Beethoven Symphony 1, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Seven They Are Seven, Belshazzar’s Feast
Beethoven rubbed shoulders with Richard Strauss in the first half of this Prom. The former’s First Symphony found Kirill Karabits stressing the lyrical nature of the slow introduction and the...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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)...
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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’...
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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...