BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Prom 26: Oliver Knussen conducts BBC Symphony Orchestra in Henze & Tippett … Peter Serkin plays Stravinsky
Oliver Knussen’s concerts are not amenable to hype – now past sixty, the conductor-composer directs sitting down, his gestures economical and to the point – but his BBC Symphony Orchestra...
Prom 25: Aurora Orchestra/Nicholas Collon – Nancarrow, Zappa & Glass with Mitch Benn & Christopher Purves
Nobody made music quite like Frank Zappa. He had the rare gift of making some incredibly complex and zany music that remained approachable, whether approached from a rock or classical...
Prom 24: British Light & Occasional Music – BBCCO/Barry Wordsworth with Noriko Ogawa & Kathryn Stott
The term ‘light music’ is easily misused, and abused, inviting negative connotations of music that is often beautifully written and proportioned. This Prom reminded us that this is emphatically not...
Prom 23: Mahler Chamber Orchestra/Daniel Harding – Mozart, Schumann & Sibelius – Paul Lewis plays K503
In C. No, not by Terry Reilly but a BBC Prom of masterworks nominally in C major, two symphonies and piano concerto, but not before the spectre of C minor...
Prom 22: Naturally 7
After a week of non-scheduled Late Night Proms (Wagner providing enough on his own), the season’s third week opened with a return to nocturnal form. It culminated three ‘late’ vocal...
Prom 21: BBCNOW/Thomas Søndergård – Turning Point & The Year 1905 – Daniel Hope plays Prokofiev
Although completed in 2006, Colin Matthews’s Turning Point (written for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) has had a long wait for a British premiere. It’s a substantial work in a 20-minute...
PCM3: Britten Up-Close [Ruby Hughes, James Gilchrist, Imogen Cooper & Christoph Denoth]
To mark the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth, BBC Proms director Roger Wright has wisely opted for quality rather than quantity in the programming, discreetly placing a mix of the...
Prom 20: Daniel Barenboim conducts Götterdämmerung [Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen: 4/4]
This conclusion to the BBC Proms’s first single-season Ring cycle – one was produced not so long ago with an opera per year, each opera’s first complete outings here –...
Prom 19: Semyon Bychkov conducts Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with Robert Dean Smith & Violeta Urmana
Stealing in with chronological correctness into the continuing drama of the Proms Ring cycle, this exceptional account of Tristan und Isolde – Wagner’s hymn to desire, darkness and death –...
Prom 18: Daniel Barenboim conducts Siegfried [Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen: 3/4]
Siegfried is often considered the ‘difficult one’ of the Ring tetralogy, for a variety of reasons: the eponymous hero is an intolerable creation, given his distaste for authority and general...
Prom 17: BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena – Joybox, Beethoven 7, Three-Cornered Hat, Boléro – Antonio Márquez Company
Dance is one of this year’s Proms themes and this programme featured music with connotations of it or written directly for it, with full choreography in the second half. The...
Prom 16: BBCNOW/Jac van Steen with Raphael Wallfisch – Falstaff, Sapphic Poem, Henry V, Tchaikovsky 4
This attractively varied and generous Prom opened with Elgar’s Falstaff, a swift, straightforward reading under Jac van Steen, very well prepared and played, a vivid and cohesive account that served...
Prom 15: Daniel Barenboim conducts Die Walküre [Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen: 2/4]
The Royal Albert Hall felt like a bear-pit for this performance of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, the ‘First Night’ of his four-part epic music-drama Der Ring des Nibelungen. Into the...
Prom 14: Daniel Barenboim conducts Das Rheingold [Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen: 1/4]
A couple of significant ‘firsts’ for this pre-First Day (preliminary evening, Das Rheingold) of Richard Wagner’s mammoth operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, the biggest and greatest work of Western...
PCM2: Huelgas Ensemble/Paul Van Nevel
As part of this year’s BBC Proms focus on Polish music, Paul Van Nevel and the Huelgas Ensemble devised a programme drawn from the 16th-century and introduced a whole section...
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