BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

BBC Proms 2009 Start Today Friday 17 July!
BBC Proms 200917 July-12 SeptemberFor the ninth successive year The Classical Source will bring you reviews of this very special music festival, the 115th season.The BBC Proms are broadcast live...
Nick Breckenfield’s Proms Round Up
Well there it is. Another musical summer at an end! From that vantage of hindsight, I look back on a supremely successful BBC Proms season. In April, it certainly looked...
The Last Night
The last night of a season of 164 events spanning an eight-week period, or the Last Night, a concert in celebration of the 2008 series of BBC Proms concerts that...
Parsifal … For the Victims of Hiroshima … Choral Symphony
Finding music that complements and enhances our understanding of the ‘traditional’ Proms performance of Beethoven’s ‘Choral’ Symphony is never easy. In choosing works that take us on a spiritual journey...
Orchestre de Paris
Coming at the tail-end of one the most sensational Proms seasons in living memory, and following three consecutive sell-out nights, it was perhaps inevitable that Orchestre de Paris’s less eye-catching...
Sinfonia antartica … Pléïdes … The Planets
British music in general, and that by Vaughan Williams in particular, has been a prominent feature of this years Proms. Neither has the European avant-garde been absent and it was...
Chicago Symphony/Haitink – 2 … Mozart & Shostakovich
This second Chicago Symphony Orchestra Prom felt like a long evening, which may have been due to Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto and Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony both being of unremitting...
Chicago Symphony/Haitink – 1 … Chicago Remains & Mahler 6
In his laid-back talk with Andrew McGregor, Mark-Anthony Turnage spoke of his influences being Stockhausen, Xenakis and Henze and the encouragement given him by Oliver Knussen. Turnage stated that the...
Capriccio … La bonne chanson … Sad Steps
Once again, demonstrating the popularity of Proms Chamber Music, Cadogan Hall was well attended for a varied programme including the world premiere of Huw Watkins’s Sad Steps.The ‘Prelude’, scored for...
Saint François d’Assise
Since its Paris premiere 25 years ago, Messiaen's “Saint François d'Assise” has gradually established a singular place in the operatic repertoire – its potency as a stage-work stemming almost entirely...
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Stéphane Denève's annual excursion South of the Border produced an enterprising programme which, for the most part, played to this combination's considerable strengths.Given Denève's...
Kaschey the Immortal … The Firebird
This Prom had a ‘compare and contrast’ feel about it in that the programme comprised two very different compositional takes on essentially the same Russian folk legend – one operatic...
Quartet for the End of Time
“Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension”. Messiaen’s comment on the first performance of the Quartet for the End of Time, given in the German prisoner-of-war...
Sea Sketches … Sea Pictures … Pathétique Symphony
Like Frank Bridge, the sea Grace Williams (1906-1977) evokes is one she had lived beside (and was to again), on the coast of Barry in Wales. Through a distanced, chilly...
Berliner Philharmoniker/Rattle – 2 … Brahms & Shostakovich
The news that Sir Simon Rattle will be staying with the Berlin Philharmonic until at least 2020 may have come as a surprise given the oft-reported disaffection between conductor and...
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