BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

NDR Symphony Orchestra
The Hamburg-based NDR Symphony Orchestra was formed in the early post-World War II days and has, almost since that time, been an ensemble of real quality and of national importance...
Sculpture
Magnus Lindberg is exceptionally busy at the moment. He had flown in from New York having attended the world premiere of his Violin Concerto and settled down to play his...
Minnesota Orchestra
The Minnesota Orchestra achieved some fame during the 1950s and 1960s as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, through its exposure on the Mercury LP label. At that time the orchestra sounded...
A Relic of Memory
For a composer who has written as much music as Mark-Anthony Turnage, choral works have been noticeably scarce in his catalogue; indeed what little there was prior to “A Relic...
Frankenstein!!
This was to be “A Night of Musical Subversion”. The programme note telling us so rambled through several examples of what the title might imply, concluding that the evening exemplified...
Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra
Although the Arena was well populated there was a surprisingly small seated audience for a concert that included a popular tone poem, an appearance by Susan Graham, and a symphony...
The Confession of Isobel Gowdie
Something of a pivotal concert in terms of the LSO and Sir Colin Davis: the Elgar has already been documented on LSO Live and the Berlioz and MacMillan pieces feature...
La Simphonie du Marais
A programme billed as “reviving the music of Lully and his contemporaries and lifting the curtain on the intimate world of music devised for Louis XIV’s private entertainment.”One could argue...
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Concert performances of operas, by which I mean performances with a line-up of soloists rather than a semi-staged recreation of a production, can sometimes be rather curious affairs that bring...
Babi Yar
Anatoly Liadov (1855-1914) wrote mostly short pieces, partly due to the difficulties (laziness!) that he incurred in finishing anything. (Otherwise he, rather than Stravinsky, might have written The Firebird.) From...
Shostakovich At The Movies
Despite his broken right-foot – an injury caused when stepping off a podium last week in Belgium – André de Ridder, crutches and all, could not be stopped conducting this...
Pathétique Symphony
It is hard to imagine music darker than Alfred Schnittke’s Viola Concerto, completed in 1985. The composer suffered his first stroke during its composition, and it is difficult not to...
András Schiff
Mozart’s piano music remains one of the most elusive areas of the repertoire; it must be simple without being facile, it requires technical mastery, but not extrovert virtuosity, feeling but...
City of London Sinfonia to the Rescue
With the Orchestra of St Luke’s and Donald Runnicles grounded in New York by transatlantic flight restrictions, it was fortunate, as Nicholas Kenyon said when addressing the audience, that the...
Budapest Festival Orchestra
On paper the first half of this concert was one of the more intriguing of the Proms season in terms of programming – contrasting two pieces by Hungarian composers who...
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