BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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The musicologist Richard Taruskin has directed particular ire at those who see fit to construct revisionist public personae for Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich and, as I perused my generously-filled Proms programme...
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The third of this season’s four Composer Portraits was devoted to the music of Kevin Volans. Born in South Africa in 1949 Volans since 1994 has been an Irish citizen....
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This was Emmanuel Pahud’s second visit to BBC Proms this year, following on from concerto performances of music by Elliott Carter and Marc-André Dalbavie. This recital’s theme was the 1940s,...
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The forceful pizzicato chords which launch Britten’s remarkable set of Variations on a Theme by his teacher and mentor Frank Bridge were decidedly underwhelming, and heralded a performance which, for...
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This second BBC Prom of Brahms with Emanuel Ax and Bernard Haitink, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, opened with a well-orchestrated chant from some in the Arena: “From Arena...
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Although only four in number, the Proms Saturday Matinees are among the most enterprising programmes of this year’s BBC Proms season. This one again featured the London Sinfonietta and the...
The music of Brahms and Schumann will forever be intertwined, but this was a truly unusual late-night Prom of musical contrasts, moving from the intensely personal asides of Brahms’s Opus...
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For Emanuel Ax, Brahms’s D minor example is the ‘Eroica’ of piano concertos. With Bernard Haitink undemonstratively conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Ax himself a model of tact,...
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Following their successful world premiere of Thomas Larcher’s ‘Double Concerto’ in the earlier Prom, Viktoria Mullova and Matthew Barley returned to explore one of their other musical passions, in tandem...
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The BBC’s commitment to new music is vital to the Proms, and this closely linked programme of Austrian music demonstrated clearly why. Thomas Larcher, born in the Tyrol, has shown...
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A long BBC Prom of Russian music; and it felt long too, at times. The juxtaposition of Petrushka and Francesca da Rimini was a really enticing one, but Esa-Pekka Salonen...
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One of the longest of this season’s Proms was this rather unwieldy three-part affair, loosely based around the commissioning acumen of the great Russian-American conductor Serge Koussevitzky and which featured...
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It is well to remember that Tchaikovsky himself upbraided his friend and pupil Sergey Taneyev when the latter observed somewhat disparagingly that there was a “flavour of ballet” in the...
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A programme that centred on the teacher-pupil relationship between Frank Bridge and Benjamin Britten for this latest of the Proms Chamber Music series at Cadogan Hall. Bridge having developed the...
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At the BBC Prom on 12 September 1963 Benjamin Britten conducted a concert of his music with the London Symphony Orchestra to anticipate his 50th-birthday on 22 November. The works...