BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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It’s perhaps extraordinary that there has not been a Comedy Prom before. The old-style format of these concerts, with what Thomas Beecham would have called “novelties” inserted even between the...
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Now settling into its half-season pattern (from the second Saturday of August to the first Saturday of September) the Proms Saturday Matinees opened with a 75th-birthday tribute to Sir Richard...
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Excepting sporadic revivals from Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood, the Western is a genre that seems to have faded from popular culture. The glory days of John Wayne riding through...
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You’d think that an evening of familiar film scores – title tracks, suites and arrangements – would be all pleasure. As it turned out, this full-to-capacity Prom turned out to...
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Johann Sebastian Bach did it, and so did Beethoven. Now Johannes Brahms has followed suit, albeit with no say in the matter unlike his illustrious predecessors – his violin concerto...
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At Steve Reich concerts there is often a palpable sense of classical and popular music rubbing shoulders, not least in the audience – a reflection on the power of his...
Kirill Karabits brought a Ukrainian countryman with him to open this Prom, Ivan Mazepa, the seventeenth-century ruler of the country. Two centuries later, with an extra ‘p’ gained and Victor...
An Anglo-French Prom this time (neatly divided by the interval), which featured at its centre a recent piece by Simon Holt, whose Centauromachy (2009) draws its inspiration from the mythical...
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Love it or loathe it, the Royal Albert Hall is a marvel of Victorian architecture but it is not perhaps the most obvious venue for launching the more delicate and...
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Her programme and performing style suggests that Khatia Buniatishvili is an artist to compare closely with a young Martha Argerich, who has paid particularly close attention to her development as...
This programme deftly contrasted two works from the late 1870s, both exhibiting their own romance, from composers at markedly different stages of their artistic development. The scale and demands of...
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That the Royal Albert Hall was packed to the rafters, with queues at every door (causing a delayed start) for a one-hour-long, late-night concert is surely testament to the pull...
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National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain concerts are special occasions at the Proms. There aren’t many times when a concertgoer sees 165 young musicians (aged thirteen to nineteen) performing at...
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The Prommers’ queue outside seemed to stretch out to infinity, and to judge from the sense of occasion and anticipation from those inside the Royal Albert Hall, everyone was rooting...
This year marks the 400th-anniversary of Tomás Luis de Victoria’s death. Not many people know that! One reason is that he is not immediately recognised as being at the top...