BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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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...
11239 1
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...
11237 1
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...
11235 1
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...
11234 1
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...
11238 1
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...
11233 1
Sporting blazers, red trousers and spotty sneakers, the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America (newly formed and partly an initiative of Carnegie Hall) made this appearance at...
11230 1
Curiouser and curiouser: in the only Prom of this season entirely devoted to Verdi in his bicentenary year, not a single item from his operatic output was performed. But more...
11231 1
The focus of the first Proms Saturday Matinee this season was Handel in Rome and the music by which he might have been influenced there. Although accomplished and distinctive pieces...
11228 1
The first complete staging of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus ‘Licht’, in Birmingham as part of the Cultural Olympiad last year (review link below), put paid to any thought that this most...
11227 1
Only a week into BBC Proms 2013 and we have variously been at sea (twice), had a double visit from Doctor Who and enjoyed the authentic sounds and balances of...
11229 1
After its exigencies with intergalactic folk at the two Doctor Who concerts, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales returned for its first ‘straight’ Prom (of three) introducing to London its...
11226 1
Thomas Adès’s Proms appearances as a conductor over the past fifteen years have also provided an overview of his evolution as a composer, and this concert – which featured the...
11223 1
There could be no doubting the fervour; nor the general reception to this, the first-ever Gospel Prom. There were some 200 singers, mostly dressed in black but with some shock...
11222 1
On its first outing, David Matthews’s A Vision of the Sea (2013) made a big impact. Impressively scored for a standard large orchestra, including harp and piano, this 22-minute symphonic...