BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Song of Songs/Stile Antico
The award-winning vocal ensemble Stile Antico (literally ‘ancient style’) entranced a crowded Cadogan Hall with extracts from “The Song of Songs” (sometimes entitled “Songs of Solomon” or “Canticles”), the shortest...
The Magic Flute … Cantata profana
A mixed bag here, in choice of repertoire and in performance. The heart of this prom was two contrasting works by Bartók, the resolutely secular and rarely performed “Cantata profana”,...
Rodgers & Hammerstein
This Promenade Concert was scheduled to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death on 23 August of Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960). However, you could not celebrate the work of the...
Tannhäuser … Rückert-Lieder … Eroica
The Philadelphia Orchestra clearly made a canny choice in appointing Yannick Nézet-Séguin as its Music Director from 2012, and it is hoped that he will continue as the Rotterdam Philharmonic’s...
Flow my tears … Neharot, Neharot
This third Proms Saturday Matinee boasted something of a high-concept programme, marrying renaissance vocal works with more-recent compositions which have been inspired by them. Death stalked each of these pieces...
Cage Cardew Skempton Feldman
This late-night Prom offered one of the season's most interesting programmes, not only on account of its content. Above all, it marked the appearance of Cornelius Cardew's music at these...
The Foundry … Pärt 4 … Poem of Ecstasy
The relatively conservative Austro-German focus of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s main Southbank Centre season has not always played to the strengths of its talented chief, the pale efficiency of whose Mahler...
20 August 1962 [Dillon replacing Musgrave]
This was a recreation (almost) of a Prom given on 20 August 1962 by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (currently in its 75th-year). Such generosity of programming reflected the norm...
Russian National Orchestra
After Ingo Metzmacher’s brilliant recontextualisation of Mahler’s Seventh and Andrew Litton’s bold miscellany of (pre-) historic Bach, there was always a danger that the Russian National Orchestra’s return to the...
Arvo Pärt’s St John Passion
The first of two ‘Pärts’, if you like, the Proms celebrating the Estonian’s 75th-birthday with a dignified late-night performance of his “St John Passion” notable for one of the best-behaved...
Huw Watkins’s Violin Concerto
Had Edward Gardner followed the programme’s advice that the Pärt would “be followed without a break by” the Britten then an interesting and complementary contrast would have been set-up between...
LSO/Gergiev – Scriabin & Stravinsky
Following his Mahler extravaganza, Valery Gergiev returned to the Proms with the London Symphony Orchestra in a more logical pairing of works separated by a mere decade and by composers...
Julia Fischer & Milana Chernyavska
An all-Belgian programme has to be something of a rarity. Eugène Ysaÿe, once described by Carl Flesch as the "most outstanding and individual violinist I have ever heard in my...
LPO/Jurowski Julia Fischer
A Night on the Bare Mountain was played in Rimsky-Korsakov’s well-meaning if sanitised version, perfectly good and very enjoyable on its own terms (indeed, the work of a master). Vladimir...
Bach on the Orchestra/Andrew Litton
This was a veritable feast of a programme for those who like their Bach as viewed by others, and his keyboard music to be bedecked in orchestral garb.Probably one of...