BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Prom 5: Bamberg Symphony Orchestra/Jonathan Nott with Arditti Quartet – Lachenmann & Mahler
The 2013 Proms season promises its share of musical subversion real or imagined, but few pieces are likely to prove more subversive than Helmut Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied (1980) which...
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PCM1: Vilde Frang & Michail Lifits – Ravel, Mozart & Lutosławski
The BBC Proms Chamber Music recitals (every Monday lunchtime during the season) commenced in refreshing style, in both performance and atmosphere. The cool and light space of Cadogan Hall was...
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Prom 4: Lully, Rameau, Delibes, Massenet, and the 1913 Rite of Spring – Les Siècles/François-Xavier Roth
An instrument for every occasion! On Bastille Day, Les Siècles (a French orchestra with its French founder-conductor) brought along various such apparatuses from different centuries to match the music that...
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Prom 3: Doctor Who … Two
Even before we had left the tube station to walk to the Royal Albert Hall, I began to hear people talking about the upcoming event with great anticipation and excitement....
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Prom 2: Doctor Who
We’ve been here before – in 2008 and 2010 – when two of the BBC’s biggest brands, the Proms and Doctor Who, collide together in the Royal Albert Hall. In...
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Prom 1: Julian Anderson’s Harmony opens Proms 2013, Sakari Oramo/Sea Symphony, Stephen Hough/Paganini Rhapsody
Behold the Proms! This bumper part-oceanic package launched (imagine a bottle of champers hitting a ship’s stern) the 2013 Season, opening with the eager anticipation to hear something new. Julian...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...