BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
Last year’s electrifying Proms appearance with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela was the sensation of the season; but this rather mixed concert with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra proved...
All-Night Vigil (Rachmaninov’s Vespers)
For his second trip to the Proms this year, Paul Hillier (who had previously taken part in a performance of Stockhausen’s “Stimmung”) brought with him the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir....
In the South … Scheherazade
Vassily Sinaisky joined the BBC Philharmonic for a concert that seemed, at best, under-rehearsed. Sinaisky is currently the orchestra’s Chief Guest Conductor so unfamiliarity with the English music is less...
Rachmaninov & Puccini
A rather curious programme combining Rachmaninov’s early First Symphony with the first of Puccini’s one-act operas from “Il trittico”. One might not have really thought the two composers were complementary...
Harawi
More stunning Messiaen as part of the Proms centenary celebrations: a performance of the song-cycle “Hawari” (written in 1932) by Gweneth-Ann Jeffers and Simon Lepper.Unusually for Messiaen, the work has...
Night Ride and Sunrise … Gaudete … Enigma Variations
Edward Gardner here returned to the BBC Symphony Orchestra for an enterprising programme.Among the more elusive of Sibelius's tone poems, Night Ride and Sunrise (1907) is never an easy piece...
Messiaen & Manchicourt
This was an intriguing idea – two pieces intended for liturgical usage for the same occasion intertwined with each other – though I am not at all sure that, ultimately,...
Porgy and Bess … Progressions … An American in Paris
The classical-jazz 'divide' – real or imagined – was the starting-point for this Prom by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Few composers have so tellingly pivoted between the two as George...
The Chairman Dances … Harlem
Four American works from the second half of the 20th-century made for an entertaining late-night Prom, conducted with gusto by Kristjan Järvi.Duke Ellington’s Harlem, for large orchestra, was given a...
Olympic Fire … Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
On the opening day of the Beijing Games, Chen Yi’s Olympic Fire received its world premiere. Although born in China, the composer now lives in the US as an American...
Ulster Orchestra
In 1915, Charles Villiers Stanford expressed his frustration at the cancellation of a Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert that was to have introduced his Second Piano Concerto to the British public....
L’Ascension … Ringed by the Flat Horizon … Boléro
The programme-book listed some previous performances of L'Ascension at the Proms, in either the original version for organ or the consequent one for orchestra. I would have been even more...
The King’s Singers
Any hesitation about hearing anything so soon after what may be the best concerto performance of this year’s Proms (Julia Fischer in Brahms’s Violin Concerto) and going straight back into...
Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra
Established as recently as 1985 and conducted by Yakov Kreizberg since 2003, the Netherlands Philharmonic is Amsterdam's 'other' orchestra, giving the majority of its orchestral concerts in the Concertgebouw. A...
Bach, Ethel Smyth, Rachmaninov – and Henry Wood
Sir Henry Wood was the common denominator for this Prom – as the dedicatee of Ethel Smyth’s Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra, an early champion of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony,...
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