BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

An Evening with Michael Ball
This Prom was set to be one of the most controversial of the 2007 season. Cries of “dumbing down” were made almost before the Prospectus was published. Michael Ball, star...
The Water Diviner’s Tale
This was a large spectacle, not without colour. The opening was a fairly robust musical storm with spotlights, high up on either side of the organ, shining simultaneously and intermittently....
Songs of a Rhineland Harper
I wonder if the Proms had ever hosted music as old as this, even in its Millennium of Music day back in 2000. Here we had a three-part programme given...
Incantation
In this, his second of four visits to the Proms this year, Jiří Bělohlávek joined forces with his countryman Ivo Kahánek to present what might be described as a Czech...
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra – 2
This particularly fascinating contrast of composers – Frenchman Debussy sometimes hostile to his near-contemporary German (Debussy was born in 1862, Wagner died in 1883) yet praising “Parsifal” as “one of...
Mahler Chamber Orchestra & Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Celebrating its tenth birthday, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra arrived at the Royal Albert Hall just two days after all but one of its players had been in this very Hall...
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra – 1
I have now heard Bernard Haitink conduct Bruckner's Eighth Symphony in London four times in as many decades (with the London Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, and twice with the Concertgebouw). It...
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment & Freiburg Baroque Orchestra
It must be over 30 years since I last attended a Promenade Concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Then the dowdiness of the venue, its antiquated procedures, not to mention...
Lucerne Festival Mahler 3
There is a certain irony in the fact that Claudio Abbado should have realised his ultimate fantasy of collective, consensual music-making in the bourgeois citadel of Lucerne. The international super-group...
Billy the Kid … Century Rolls … Doctor Atomic Symphony
John Adams’s now-regular visits to the BBC Symphony Orchestra have become key events for his enthusiastic band of admirers and less key for the larger audience – here Adams was...
Powder Her Face … Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
A Prom of unequal halves, in terms of duration at least. The 18 minutes of music in the first half made a distinctive impression even so, with Webern's fastidious orchestral...
Soloists of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra
In 2003 Claudio Abbado and Michael Haefliger established the Lucerne Festival Orchestra as a platform for established musicians from around the world to come together and make music. As well...
Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela
I suspect that after the debut of the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Proms may have to be categorised like hurricanes. Certainly, this Prom was Category 5.From the...
LSO & VBE
What we lost in the form of the injured Maxim Vengerov, who was due to play the Viola Tango Rock Concerto by Benjamin Yusupov, with the composer conducting, was more...
The Apostles
It was in Birmingham that Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius” (1900), “The Apostles” (1903) and “The Kingdom” (1906) were first performed. The first of these is not an oratorio, said...
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