BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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PSM1: Armonia Atenea/George Petrou with Myrsini Margariti & Irini Karaianni – Greek Mythology and Baroque Opera
George Petrou has been a rather well-kept secret in the world of Baroque opera performance, at least in the UK. Handel fans will probably already know his handful of recordings,...
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Prom 20: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins with James Crabb – War Elegy, The Singing, Walton 1; Sally Beamish Composer Portrait
Sally Beamish is a very successful composer. Despite experiencing what might have been the somewhat off-putting interviewing style by the fast-talking Andrew McGregor, she emerged as a pleasant, outgoing personality,...
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Prom 19: Royal Liverpool Philharmonic/Vasily Petrenko with Inger Dam-Jensen and BBC Singers – Richard Strauss’s Festival Prelude, German Motet & Four Last Songs and Elgar’s Second Symphony
An intriguing if impractical programme in which the presence of Elgar alongside Richard Strauss (it’s the latter’s 150th-anniversary) prompted the thought that British music of a certain kind has featured...
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Prom 18: BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena with Alexandre Tharaud – Night’s Black Bird, Ravel’s Left-Hand Piano Concerto, Mahler 5
Following Prom 10 and the two CBeebies programmes, the BBC Philharmonic returned with Chief Conductor Juanjo Mena and opened with Harrison Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird. On paper there was a...
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Prom 17: Late-night Les Arts Florissants/William Christie – Rameau’s Grands Motets
This was the second appearance of Les Arts Florissants at the Proms this season, again celebrating Rameau in the 250th-anniversary year of his death. Seeing as Rameau’s contribution to the...
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Prom 16: Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra/Sascha Goetzel – Islamey … Beni Mora … Belkis, Queen of Sheba – with Daniel Hope giving the premiere of Gabriel Prokofiev’s ‘1914’ Violin Concerto
A Proms visit from Turkey’s leading orchestra might have been expected to focus on music with an Eastern or Oriental flavour and so it proved, though the centrepiece of this...
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Prom 15: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Josep Pons – Gaia Theory & Daphnis and Chloe … Ingrid Fliter plays Mozart K488
What is Gaia Theory? Well, it’s an assertion by the scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock that Planet Earth behaves as a self-regulating organism which tends to maintain surface conditions on...
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PCM2: C. P. E. Bach with Rachel Podger & Friends
The second anniversary concert of the Proms Chamber Music season was directed by Rachel Podger, featuring a varied selection of music by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian’s second son...
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Prom 14: BBCNOW/Thierry Fischer – Ravel waltzes, Duruflé’s Requiem, and Emmanuel Pahud gives the world premiere of Simon Holt’s Morpheus Wakes
The first of four appearances this Proms season for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales was a distinctly French affair. Former Principal Conductor Thierry Fischer’s lightness of touch together with...
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Prom 13: CBeebies [2/2]
Giant furry creatures greeted us outside the Royal Albert Hall as we arrived for the second CBeebies Prom. Inside, TV screens were festooned around the auditorium and CBeebies imagery mixed...
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Prom 12: J. S. Bach’s St John Passion conducted by Roger Norrington with James Gilchrist as the Evangelist
Roger Norrington has been Principal Conductor of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra since 2011. It was formed shortly after the Second World War, but Zürcher Sing-Akademie is a comparatively new body,...
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Prom 11: CBeebies [1/2]
The first of two CBeebies Proms landed at the Royal Albert Hall like The Beatles at Shea Stadium. Never have you heard such screams of delight from pre-schoolers and parents...
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Prom 10: BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena with Tasmin Little – Walton, Moeran, Daedalus in Flight, Enigma Variations; David Horne Portrait
This was David Horne’s evening. We started in the Royal College of Music for a Composer Portrait (the first of the usual four this Proms season), a lively and informative...
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Prom 9: LSO/Valery Gergiev with Barry Douglas – Brahms’s Piano Concerto 1 and Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass
With more rhythmic dynamism in one bar of each of these works than in the whole of the Pet Shop Boys’ Prom the previous evening, Valery Gergiev and his performers...
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Prom 8: Neil Tennant/Chris Lowe – Pet Shop Boys – with Chrissie Hynde and Juliet Stevenson, including the world premiere of A Man from the Future
The Pet Shop Boys have been releasing beautifully laconic electro-pop music for close on thirty years, but having long mastered the art of the short pop song they are proving...