BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Prom 76: The Last Night of the Proms 2012
With Team GB anticipated as doing so well it is hardly surprising that the Last Night of the Proms celebrations had the Olympics as one of its focal points and...
Prom 75: Vienna Philharmonic/Haitink – Haydn & Strauss
For the penultimate concert of this year’s BBC Proms season, the Vienna Philharmonic and Bernard Haitink scaled the heights of Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony. As a contrasting opener was...
Prom 74: Staff Benda Bilili
A concert carefully timed to coincide with the Paralympics welcomed Staff Benda Bilili to the Proms. An extraordinary collection of paraplegic Congolese street musicians and ex-street kids, Staff Benda Bilili...
Prom 73: Vienna Philharmonic/Haitink – Beethoven & Bruckner
The Vienna Philharmonic gave core repertoire for the first of its two BBC Proms, reminding us of the unassailability of the Viennese tradition, expressed in its inimitable sound, which the...
Prom 72: John Adams conducts Nixon in China
Doubts, I’ve had a few...They remain as the opening bars of Nixon in China (first staged in 1987) get underway, a simple refrain that becomes overdone for all that a...
Prom 71: St Louis Symphony/David Robertson
David Robertson, a regular at the BBC Proms over the past fifteen years, here brought the St Louis Symphony for its first-ever appearance at the festival. He has been music...
Prom 70: Desert Island Discs
Perhaps it was the unknown quantity of this Prom that led to a smaller than usual Arena and Gallery audience, but it certainly hadn’t affected seat sales. And those who...
PCM8: Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays Debussy
In his 150th-anniversary year, this year’s BBC Proms season has included an examination of Debussy’s principal chamber works – and now, courtesy of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a well-programmed piano recital.Aimard began...
Prom 69: Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra/Chailly – Messiaen & Mahler
A concert of two distinct halves! Olivier Messiaen’s 1964 tribute to the dead of both world wars, each of the five movements headed by quotations from the Bible, and scored...
Prom 68: Cameron Carpenter plays Bach & Mahler on the Royal Albert Hall organ
Twenty-four hours later, here we were again. Cameron Carpenter, 31, returned for his second BBC Prom with more music by and inspired by J. S. Bach, and what proved a...
Prom 67: Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra/Chailly – Mendelssohn Originals
Mendelssohn’s capacity to surprise is not the first feature one associates with his music, but this Prom was full of the unusual emerging from the familiar. Of the four works...
Prom 66: Cameron Carpenter plays Bach on the Royal Albert Hall organ
Often organists do not make much of a splash in the music world, hidden, as they often are, high up in a (dusty) organ loft. The great American virtuoso Virgil...
Prom 65: Martin Taylor & Guy Barker – The Spirit of Django
The Proms has given rise to a fair number of jazz (or jazz-related) concerts during recent years. Only two weeks ago the National Youth Jazz Orchestra presented an impressive showcase,...
Prom 64: Berliner Philharmoniker/Rattle – Brahms and Lutosławski
This second concert of Berliner Philharmoniker’s latest visit to the Proms comprised two works that were completed in just over a century of each other. Whether there were any more...
Prom 63: Berliner Philharmoniker/Rattle – Ligeti, Wagner, Sibelius, Debussy and Ravel
This scintillating, stimulating and often coruscating Prom was one of two halves. The first contained music that revealed interior (often uncomfortable) truths; the second created no less terrifying emotions but...
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