BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

BBC Prom: The Golden Age of Broadway Photograph: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
The Golden Age of Broadway – Richard Balcombe and BBC Concert Orchestra
There can be no better way to celebrate a return after an absence than with a nostalgic look back to yesteryear and, even though Broadway only came to the Proms...
First Night of the Proms 2021 Photograph: Chris Christodoulou
First Night of the Proms 2021 – Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music; Poulenc’s Organ Concerto; James MacMillan’s When Soft Voices Die; Sibelius’s Second Symphony
And they’re off! After the trimmed-down and audience-less 2020 season, it is absolutely glorious that there is a six-week BBC Proms season, with a physically present audience, at the Royal Albert Hall...
Soprano Golda Schultz with the BBC SO conducted by Dalia Stasevska on stage at the Last Night of the Proms on Saturday 12 November. Photo by Mark Allan/BBC
Prom 16: The Last Night 2020
With 300 musicians reduced to just 65, a socially distanced audience viewing from the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and the BBC Singers scattered about the stalls where, in times past,...
Nicholas Collon conducts Aurora Orchestra Photo: Chris Christodoulou
Prom 15: Nicholas Collon conducts Aurora Orchestra in Beethoven 7 & Richard Ayres’s No.52
If Beethoven had been alive in 1963, he might well have nodded approvingly after reading Sydney Carter’s lyrics: “Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the...
Benjamin Grosvenor piano & Jason Evans trumpet Photo: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
Prom 14: Paavo Järvi conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra in Ravel & Mozart – Benjamin Grosvenor & Jason Evans play Shostakovich
Replacing Esa-Pekka Salonen, if without changing the programme, Paavo Järvi opened with Le tombeau de Couperin, Ravel’s tribute to friends lost in World War One, expressive music located through a...
BBC National Orchestra of Wales Photo: Jake Bufton
Prom 13 – Ryan Bancroft conducts BBC National Orchestra of Wales – Natalya Romaniw sings Barber’s Knoxville
With this live no-audience Prom Ryan Bancroft opened his account as Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, swinging into action with Bohuslav Martinů’s Jazz Suite (1928), music...
Prom_7 September 2020_Credit Mark Allan_6
Prom 12: Kokoroko
Kokoroko, a London West African jazz-fusion band, made its Proms premiere in splendid isolation performing in the vast solitary cavern that is this year’s RAH bathed in blue lonesome light...
Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cello) & Isata Kanneh-Mason (piano). Photo: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
Prom 10 – Sheku & Isata Kanneh-Mason – Cello Sonatas by Beethoven, Barber & Rachmaninov
Recital recorded on August 27; first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on September 6; this review is of the relay on BBC Four, September 11 Chamber music in the cavernous...
BBC Scotish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alpesh Chauhan with pianist Stephen Hough. Photo: BBC/Martin Shields
Prom 9 – BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at City Halls Glasgow – Alpesh Chauhan & Stephen Hough
Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (for twenty-three solo strings) has done sterling service during lockdown, a gift to reduced, socially-distanced ensembles. Directed on this occasion by Alpesh Chauhan (the BBCSSO’s Associate Conductor,...
Prom 8: Anoushka Shankar and Jules Buckley: New Explorations
A lugubrious tuning of a Sitar melts into Josie d’Arblay in a powder-blue power-suit gushing over the evening’s offering. Anoushka’s father Ravi Shankar who died in 2012 had an immense...
Nicola Benedetti & Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Photo - BBC:Chris Christodoulou
Prom 7: Baroque Doubles
Following the sad news of the death of her double bass-playing father, Alina Ibragimova withdrew from this concert, necessitating a few changes to the programme and Nicola Benedetti to step...
Allan Clayton (tenor) Photo: BBC
Prom 6: BBC Philharmonic live from Salford Quays – John Storgårds & Allan Clayton
Omer Meir Wellber should have presided over this live Prom but illness meant that he ceded the podium to John Storgårds: it was one titled BBC Philharmonic conductor for another....
Jonathan Davies - bassoon. Photo: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
Prom 5: London Sinfonietta
Live Prom 5 brought back to the Royal Albert Hall stage one of the Proms’ contemporary stalwarts of the last 50 years, the London Sinfonietta.  The Proms archive lists this...
Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO. Photo: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
Prom 3: Rattle, Uchida and the LSO
This apparently bitty and disparate programme proved much more satisfying than the BBC’s conventionally structured opening night. There were tangible thematic connections between pieces and an imaginative attempt to exploit...
Jonathan Scott (organ) - Photo: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
Prom 2: Jonathan Scott at the Royal Albert Hall – Symphonic Organ
Concert organists are mostly used to playing with their backs to an audience. But unable to see a hall of keen-eared listeners and sensing their presence are two different experiences....
Skip to content