BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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Prom 59: Richard Strauss’s Elektra with Christine Goerke, Gun-Brit Barkmin, Felicity Palmer & Johan Reuter; Semyon Bychkov conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra
What a weekend it has been for musical high Romanticism at the Proms – of a notably deathly hue – comprising not just the Strauss operatic double bill of Salome...
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Prom 58 – Richard Strauss’s Salome with Nina Stemme, Doris Soffel, Samuel Youn & Burkhard Ulrich; Donald Runnicles conducts the Orchestra of Deutsche Oper Berlin
This Proms weekend sees the ultimate Richard Strauss ‘double-whammy’ with Salome and Elektra given on consecutive nights (not by the same artists!): in the unlikely event of these operas being...
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PSM3: Peter Maxwell Davies – Linguae ignis, Revelation and Fall, A Mirror of Whitening Light – London Sinfonietta/Sian Edwards with Tim Gill and Rebecca Bottone
The third Proms Saturday Matinee of the 2014 Season focussed on the music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies – who, having completed his decade-long tenure of Master of the Queen’s...
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Prom 57: Daniel Harding conducts Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony – Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Daniel Harding will largely be known to London and British audiences through his conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Here, however, he masterfully steered the ensemble of which he is currently...
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Prom 56: London Philharmonic/Vladimir Jurowski with Alexander Toradze – The Planets, Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, Scriabin’s Prometheus
Though he has laudably championed contemporary British composers with the London Philharmonic, Vladimir Jurowski doesn’t have much of a track record in what is usually described as “English” music –...
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Prom 55: Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra/Myung-Whun Chung with sheng-player Wu Wei – La mer, Šu, Pathétique Symphony
Under its music director Myung-Whun Chung, over the past ten years the Seoul Philharmonic has successfully been buffing up its international reputation as the Far East’s best orchestra; surprisingly, though,...
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Prom 54: John Eliot Gardiner conducts Beethoven’s Missa solemnis
The late-night Proms seem to become more adventurous in scope, and surely there are few other compositions which can equal, still less surpass, the epic vision of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis....
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Prom 53: Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer (2) – Brahms’s Third and Fourth Symphonies
The Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer returned to the Royal Albert Hall for a second night and to launch a Proms Brahms Symphony Cycle with the final two such...
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Prom 52: Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer (1) – Hungarian Dances, Unfinished Symphony, Music of the Spheres, Pleasure Train, Blue Danube Waltz, Dances of Galánta
Many years ago record companies put out collections of short, lighter pieces on LP under some such title as “Promenade Favourites”. Even then the concept was outdated, since the Proms...
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Prom 51: Ulster Orchestra/Jac van Steen with Zhang Zuo – Slavonic Dances, Grieg’s Piano Concerto, Roscatha, Bill Whelan’s Riverdance Suite
The latest Bank Holiday Weekend at the Proms could easily have been marketed as a Dance-a-thon. Saturday night’s Mother Goose and Scheherazade were both made into ballets, and Sunday night’s...
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PCM6: Mozart, Mahler and Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen – Louis Schwizgebel & Royal String Quartet
An oddly assorted Proms Chamber Music recital, beginning with Mozart in limpidly unaffected mood. His D major Piano Sonata (1777) may not be among the most probing or prescient of...
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Prom 50: Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Jiří Bělohlávek with Alisa Weilerstein – From the House of the Dead, Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, Beethoven 7
What makes a good Prom? There are various scenarios and this marvellous concert epitomised at least three of them: the visiting orchestra, on its mettle and determined to show itself...
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Prom 49: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo with Anu Komsi – Mother Goose, Voice verser, Songs of a Fairy Princess, Scheherazade
This Prom – combining French, Finnish, Polish and Russian music with a common basis in the fantastical – was as much a showcase for soprano Anu Komsi as for that...
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Prom 48: Iceland Symphony Orchestra/Ilan Volkov with Jonathan Biss – Magma, Schumann’s Piano Concerto, Geysir, Beethoven 5
Not the longest-travelled orchestra to the Proms (the Melbourne Symphony took the palm there) nor the highest in latitude (the Lapland Chamber Orchestra are more northerly), but the Iceland Symphony...
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Prom 47: Britten’s War Requiem – Andris Nelsons conducts CBSO, BBC Proms Youth Choir, CBSO Children’s Chorus, Susan Gritton, Toby Spence & Hanno Müller-Brachmann
This year’s Proms are serving the centenary of the start of the First World War with a wealth of imaginative programming, and it’s right that the orchestra that played in...