BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

It had to happen – a grey day with spots of rain as I headed to Cadogan Hall. But still, without sun streaming through the high windows, the hall looks...
They say a week is a long time in politics. The same might be said of music. After Jiří Bělohlávek splendid Mahler 9 with the Scottish National Orchestra at the...
Commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and first performed by it under Kurt Masur in April 2003, The Light of the End is undoubtedly one of Sofia Gubaidulina's more dramatic...
The Scottish Ensemble has its origins in the Scottish Baroque Ensemble founded in 1969. A string group, it consists of 15 players, only two of whom are male. Clio Gould,...
Beethoven made a profound impression on Tippett and his music, and the pairing of these two composers, although familiar, remains a potent one.Sir Colin Davis has led a significant number...
New Zealand, as a nation, has always punched well above its weight. The population of just four million people, a little over half that of London, has produced world leaders...
It was an interesting idea to couple works by Arvo Pärt with the plainchant and medieval music which has inspired and informed his output since 1976, when he discovered a...
Alban Berg did not live to complete his second and final opera, “Lulu”. Given the climate in mid-1930s Germany, he almost certainly sensed the impossibility of having has work staged....
There is almost certainly more music around than we actually need, as Alexander Goehr has observed. Even if you restrict yourself to that segment of the continuum of music referred...
The pairing of Tchaikovsky's final opera “Iolanta” with his final ballet “The Nutcracker”, as heard in St Petersburg on 18 December 1892 – and in that order – made for...
Lars Vogt is built on a great, bear-like frame. There is nothing ungainly about him, however. He glides onto the platform in immaculate control of his physical presence, modestly. He...
This was a time when the music mattered not all that much – at least not for the audience. As Daniel Barenboim said in his impromptu speech at the official...
Halfway through the 2005 Proms (four weeks to the Last Night!) and the annual world-music Prom is this year devoted to “Africa 05”, part of the much wider festival running...
Mendelssohn has probably not received sufficient recognition for being a leading figure of the early Romantic Movement. After all he wrote a lot of works in the inherited, classical forms...
The first of two mermaids at this year’s Proms (the second is in Zemlinsky’s opulent tone poem on 4 September), Bent Sørensen’s work based on fellow-Dane Hans Christian Andersen’s most...
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