BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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’...
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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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The hybrid term “opera-oratorio” captures the flavour of Oedipus rex very well. Bracing in its directness, searing in its impact, Stravinsky’s fifty-minute adaptation of Sophocles’s first Oedipus play may not...
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The house was at best two-thirds full but this programme certainly played to the strengths of Mark Wigglesworth, the nearly-man whose upcoming ENO tenure might just consummate all that early...
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For its 20th-appearance at the Proms, appearing with Vasily Petrenko rather than the indisposed Semyon Bychkov (who will, we are assured, be back for Strauss’s Elektra later in the month),...
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Presumably not commissioned with the First World War commemoration in mind, one of the late Sir John Tavener’s last works was appositely premiered in this Prom leading up to the...
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An enticing juxtaposition of contemporaneous masterpieces, brought all the closer given there was no interval, the Mahler completed in 1909 and the Vaughan Williams the following year in which he...
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Summer days and serenades for wind instruments are an ideal match. The light streaming through the windows of Cadogan Hall only enhanced that feeling, particularly so in early Richard Strauss...
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The Sun Dances, written in the year 2000 by John McLeod (born in 1934), has suffered the fate of many a new work. Commissioned by the National Youth Orchestra of...
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Initially leaving me (somewhat uncharacteristically) at a loss for words, the BBC Proms teamed up with the National Theatre for the first time to present a centenary commemoration of the...
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‘Another op’nin’, another show’ – this time Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate. John Wilson and his hand-picked Orchestra have delighted Proms-goers since 2009 with their celebration of classic M-G-M film...