BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

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Britten & Auden
As if saving the best till last, the Proms Saturday Matinee series came to a brilliantly conceived end with this extraordinary snapshot of Benjamin Britten before he was 30. There...
Two’s Company
Although there are notable works for oboe and percussion by Birtwistle and Xenakis, Thea Musgrave’s Two’s Company – the last of the BBC’s commissions for Proms 2007 – could well...
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Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra – 2
Two very different symphonies, generously coupled here in the second of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra’s two Proms, that seek reconciliation; Honegger through a suggestion of paradise after violent strife...
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Ophelia Dances … Songs for Sue … Book of Hours
In his second, most welcome, Prom of the season, Oliver Knussen conducted the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (of which he is artist in association) in an exquisite late-night programme, including...
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Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra – 1
What if BMW ‘did’ orchestras? Of course they would be sleek and elegant and designed for maximum efficiency. They would happily traverse melodious peaks as well as trip lightly over...
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LSO/Gergiev
Coming so soon after Claudio Abbado’s display of perfectionism (Lucerne Festival Orchestra Mahler 3), it was as well to be reminded that there’s more than one way to skin a...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...