BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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After recent productions in which direction has run amok, a concert performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio was an enticing prospect, but initially this Prom, led by the BBC Philharmonic and its...
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John Williams may have won five Academy Awards, twenty-two Grammys and seven BAFTAs but his greatest achievement is that he kept the art of orchestral film-music alive when it was...
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A French Prom, with music covering three centuries: from Jean-Féry Rebel’s 1737 ballet to Pascal Dusapin’s new work for cello and orchestra, composed for Alisa Weilerstein, and first-performed just over...
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This team’s second helping of Sibelius and Shostakovich at this year’s Proms included a real rarity in the form of the latter’s symphonic poem, October (1967). It is an occasional...
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In the first of two successive Proms appearances, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales showed its polish to advantage under Thomas Søndergård. Their ease with Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony was abundantly...
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Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini celebrated Monteverdi’s 450th-anniversary and their twenty-first in typically effervescent style. Three five-part Madrigals opened, written between 1603 and 1605 during the composer’s time at the...
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For the second of their two Proms, Daniel Barenboim and Staatskapelle Berlin contrasted works by Elgar and Birtwistle written over a century apart, essaying between them an intriguing, challengingly sourced...
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Now eighty-eight, in charge of his eighty-ninth Prom, Bernard Haitink has never been a conductor of extremes or histrionics. To this classic mix of Mozart and Schumann he brought all...
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The end of the Proms season was upon us a little early to close this invigorating concert by Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim. He decided, for whatever reason, to play...
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And so the world’s longest and possibly greatest music festival comes round again. 2017 may be a little thin on significant musical anniversaries but the BBC has been intimately involved...
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This year at the Proms we are celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the BBC taking responsibility for what was already a popular festival – saving it from bankruptcy. With that...
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With “Remain” campaigners handing out EU flags and hoping to hijack the Last Night celebrations on one side, and 10,000 Union-flags freely distributed by “Brexiteers” on the other – for...
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I see that Zurich Opera is putting on a dance version of Verdi’s Requiem later this year – imagine the opportunities offered by the ‘Dies irae’ – and at least...
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First, the curiosity. What does it mean for a ‘period’-performance ensemble to programme two Baroque pieces in arrangements by Leopold Stokowski designed precisely to exploit their latent musical possibilities through...
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In their second Proms appearance this season, Christian Thielemann and Staatskapelle Dresden demonstrated again a characteristic authority and assurance in their native repertoire, whether familiar or not.Beethoven’s is one of...