BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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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....
14707 1
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...
14701 1
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...
14702 1
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...
14699 1
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...
14697 1
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...
14695 1
This Prom was notable, above all, for the first performance (nineteen years since he first had a work premiered at these concerts) of Julian Anderson’s The Imaginary Museum (2017). Subtitled...
14694 1
Scott Walker has earned the rare reputation as a pioneering force as a singer and songwriter, with his works interpreted and cited as an influence by illustrious artists such as...
14692 1
The Royal Albert Hall knows him best as the man who extended the concept of authentic period performance to the work of the great twentieth-century songwriters and their arrangers but,...
14689 1
“Just look at all those white-haired balding Prommers, Bob – thirty or forty years ago, their hair was so much darker – in thirty years’ time, there won’t be any...
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If the Van Kuijk Quartet saved the crowd-pleasers until later – when joined by Annelien Van Wauwe – in many ways the more interesting performances were at the beginning. Anton...
14688 1
There was a distinct Doctor Who feel to this Ten Pieces Prom. A time traveller was summoned to the Royal Albert Hall pursued by a malevolent cosmic leader in female...
14686 1
The Ten Pieces project has now reached over four-million young people since 2010 with the aim of getting them to produce creative responses to classical music. The latest outing at...
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Four years running Nicholas Collon and Aurora Orchestra have astounded Proms audiences with an audacious feat of memory – Mozart and Beethoven Symphonies: now the ‘Eroica’, and in between they...
14684 1
A city decked with rainbow flags and banners, locals and visitors – including an unusual number of “morris sides” – sang and played music in a carnival atmosphere for the...