BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

First Night of the Proms – Sakari Oramo conducts the BBCSO in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony
Is there a collective noun for sighs, I wonder? Even if such exhalations of breath are not always audible, there must have been more than just a few around Kensington...
The Manchester Camerata
Our series exploring the Proms archives continues with a performance from 2005 marking the Manchester Camerata’s debut at the festival. Kate Royal returned for her third Proms visit to sing...
Vasily Petrenko conducts Rachmaninov and Shostakovich
‘A composer’s music should express his love affairs, his religion, the books that have influenced him, the pictures he loves.’ So said Rachmaninov, whose Third Symphony does just that through...
Leonard Bernstein conducts Mahler’s Fifth Symphony
Bernstein appeared only twice at the Proms. In tonight’s selection from the Proms archive, we hear the first of those appearances, from 1987. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, with its sublime slow...
The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra
In this concert from the Proms archives, British conductor Jonathan Nott conducted the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester in a programme framed by a pair of works famously used on the soundtrack...
Daniel Harding and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony
In 2003 the distinguished Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen made its second visit to the Proms, with its then Music Director Daniel Harding – making his fifth Proms appearance at the age...
Bach’s St Matthew Passion
Phillipe Herreweghe’s expressive but fleet-footed Bach won praise at his Proms debut in 1996. Two years later, in this highlight from the archives, he turned to one of the peaks...
Organ Symphony
Paavo Järvi and the Orchestre de Paris continue our series of highlights from the Proms archive, beginning with Arvo Pärt’s meditative Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten. Janine Jansen is the...
Susan Graham sings French song
In today's chamber music concert given in Cadogan Hall in 2009, American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham performs repertoire close to her heart with pianist Malcolm Martineau: a sampler of 19th- and...
Haitink conducts Verdi’s Don Carlos
First appearing at the festival in 1966, Bernard Haitink gave his final Proms performance – his 90th! – in September 2019, on his last week before retirement. In 1996 he...
Music of the Spheres
In this Prom from the 2010 season, Thomas Dausgaard conducts his Danish forces in Tchaikovsky’s ever-captivating Violin Concerto – written for the composer’s young muse, the violinist Josef Kotek –...
Colin Davis conducts Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is surely the apogee of the pastoral. Here it is prefaced by Sibelius’s late tone-poem, which he premiered in the USA, and Michael Tippett’s shimmering evocation of...
A solo recital by star pianist Evgeny Kissin
This 1997 recital – the first ever solo piano recital at the Proms – showcases the Russian phenomenon Evgeny Kissin in only his second Proms performance. At 26, his performances...
Carlo Maria Giulini conducts Brahms
Brahms’s development in the time between composing his First and Second Symphonies was remarkable. Despite finishing it less than a year after the premiere of his First, the Second Symphony...
Mahler’s Seventh Symphony with the BBC Philharmonic
After almost a decade at the helm of the BBC Philharmonic, Gianandrea Noseda (who later became the orchestra’s Conductor Laureate) opened this 2012 Prom with Mozart’s famous overture to Don...
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