BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Prom 41: Aurora Orchestra and Nicholas Collon play Mozart 40 – with Alexandra Wood & Stevie Wishart Spinning a Yarn – and the world premiere of Benedict Mason’s Meld
Given its unique ambience and dimensions, the Royal Albert Hall might be thought an ideal venue to put on a musical ‘event’ such as Benedict Mason has been synonymous with...
Prom 40: LSO/Bernard Haitink with Camilla Tilling – Schubert 5 & Mahler 4
Some conductors gracing Proms 2014 are marking significant birthdays this year – Donald Runnicles 60, Andrew Davis 70, Roger Norrington 80 and Neville Marriner 90. Nor should we forget those...
Prom 39: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Markus Stenz with Jonathan Biss – Les Indes galantes, Bernard Rands’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Mozart 1/K16, Ein Heldenleben
One might look in vain for any connection among the pieces of this concert; rather the selection seemed to revel in music-making for its own sake. Indeed it was all...
Prom 38: BBC Philharmonic/John Storgårds with Leonard Elschenbroich – Finlandia, Max 5, Frank Bridge’s Oration, Sibelius 2; Peter Maxwell Davies Composer Portrait
As his eightieth-birthday celebrations gather momentum, this was a good time for the Proms to gain Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s insight into his own music, ahead of two concerts devoted...
Prom 37: Steve Reich – It’s Gonna Rain, The Desert Music – David Hill conducts BBC Singers & Endymion
Fifty years after Steve Reich made a tape recording of Brother Walter preaching in Union Square, San Francisco, the resultant piece of phasing, It’s Gonna Rain, continues to have a...
Prom 36: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo with Janine Jansen – Vaughan Williams’s The Wasps, The Lark Ascending & Job – and William Alwyn’s First Symphony
An oddly arranged yet absorbing programme of English music – the first half opening and closing with Ralph Vaughan Williams ‘favourites’. That the Overture to his incidental music for Aristophanes’s...
Prom 35: BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Thomas Søndergård with James Ehnes – Caroline Mathilde, Walton, The Swan of Tuonela, Sibelius 5
After two collaborations with erstwhile chiefs, one distinctly wobbly, the other immensely assured, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales has given two Proms under its current principal conductor, Thomas Søndergård....
Prom 34: BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Thomas Søndergård with Francesco Piemontesi – Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration & Burleske, Mozart K386, Nielsen 5
In an imaginative and satisfying Prom that contained nothing over-familiar yet had plenty of red meat, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and its effortlessly authoritative conductor Thomas Søndergård gave...
PCM4: Janine Jansen, Sakari Oramo & Itamar Golan – Prokofiev & Schubert
This was the first of three Proms appearances this season for Janine Jansen. Each is in the company of Sakari Oramo, though on this occasion the conductor was enjoying a...
Prom 33: National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain/Edward Gardner with Louis Schwizgebel – Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Prokofiev, Birtwistle, Lutosławski
The National Youth Orchestra rode magnificently into town with an equally resplendent programme. Given the NYO’s typically outsize numbers of personnel, Stravinsky’s music for the ballet Petrushka in its original...
Prom 32: Academy of St Martin in the Fields with Neville Marriner, Joshua Bell and John Hurt – Beethoven & Bruch and William Walton’s music for Henry V
Déjà-vu informed the first half of this Prom, for Joshua Bell had led, as here from the first desk, the ASMF in the Beethoven in October 2012 and had played...
Prom 31: Hallé/Mark Elder with Alice Coote – Le Corsaire, Sea Pictures, Near Midnight, Eroica Symphony
Musicians don’t always give the performances that they talk about. In an interview for the Proms programme, Mark Elder says he has no place for “comfortable opulence” as part of...
PSM2: Lapland Chamber Orchestra/John Storgårds with Håkan Hardenberger in Harrison Birtwistle’s Endless Parade
Proms 2014 includes a veritable spreadsheet of visiting orchestras, and quite a few are not the ‘usual suspects’. Very welcome they are too, a complement to Cadogan Hall’s Zurich International...
Prom 30: Battle of the Bands presented by Clare Teal – Count Basie/James Pearson versus Duke Ellington/Grant Windsor
Jazz bands have often gone places where classical orchestras fear to tread (or, more to the point, never thought of going) – one such being the ‘battles of the bands’...
Prom 29: BBC Philharmonic/Gianandrea Noseda – Casella & Saint-Saëns – Benjamin Grosvenor plays Chopin & Franck
This was a good old-fashioned Proms programme. To the casual listener Alfredo Casella’s Elegia eroica, from 1916 – dedicated to the Italian dead of World War One – sounds like...
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