BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

The Great Venetians
The music composed in the seventeenth-century for St Mark’s Church in Venice forms an astonishing monument to religious power and material wealth. Giovanni Gabrieli, and later Monteverdi, placed multiple choirs...
An Evening of Passacaglias
In its only visit to this year’s Proms, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director, Sakari Oramo, considered the passacaglia, which as a form dates back to...
Juan Diego Flórez
A very warm evening, which was perhaps unfortunate as the programme was, to say the least, full – perhaps too full for total enjoyment. It was a first at the...
Dance Figures
The music of George Benjamin has featured regularly at the Proms since Ringed by the Flat Horizon brought the 20-year-old composer to national prominence in 1980. Surprising, then, that it...
Kate Royal & Christine Rice
This Proms Chamber Music recital presented the admirable Roger Vignoles in the company of two young singers, Kate Royal and Christine Rice, in a programme devised by him.It was with...
In the South … A Colour Symphony … Belshazzar’s Feast
Richard Hickox made his farewell appearance as Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with a programme of British music closely associated with him.Elgar’s In the South needs...
The Cunning Little Vixen
Working backwards, what is arguably Dvořák’s greatest symphony seemed here rather less so. For all that Richard Hickox was alive to the music’s fire, urgency and lyricism, a conspicuous lack...
Blue Peter Safari
Feeling a little under-accompanied, as I went solo to this concert without any young relatives who may be more au-fait with “Blue Peter” in the current century, I was still...
Ramifications
On paper this was a concert in typical form – an overture, albeit not termed as such – a concerto and a symphony, all from central Europe. What could be...
Romeo & Juliet
Since Prokofiev never left a final, definitive performing version of his opera “War and Peace”, there is some uncertainty as to whether, ultimately, this overture was to be included. In...
A Little Birthday Music
Happy Birthday Ma’am!Four years ago the Queen came to the Proms during her Golden Jubilee celebrations and met some front-row Prommers. This year, in honour of her 80th-birthday, she was...
Così fan tutte
There is a moment towards the end of Jane Austen’s last novel, “Persuasion” (1815), where the heroine Anne Elliott is in debate with a relatively minor character, Captain Harvill, about...
To Compose Without the Least Knowledge of Music
The Royal Albert Hall is an odd venue for small-group music, not so much ‘chamber’ as ‘echo chamber’, and with the sun setting on a balmy Hyde Park, it seemed...
Hallé
In his tenure thus far, Mark Elder (Music Director since 2000) has been patiently building the Hallé Orchestra (or Hallé as seems to be its preferred, singular billing) into a...
Christoph Eschenbach & Paris Orchestra Soloists
The first Proms Chamber Music of the season, this lunchtime programme following-on from the Paris Orchestra’s “Siegfried” the previous evening, which Christoph Eschenbach conducted.This enterprising recital was despatched, for the...
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