fri 11/07/2025

Royal Albert Hall

Prom 32: Bartlett, Elschenbroich, RPO, Whitacre

The England cricket team recently went through seven Test matches alternating winning and losing, the longest such sequence in the history of the game. Eric Whitacre managed a similar, and similarly frustrating, series of hits and misses in his...

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Prom 29: Bavouzet, BBC Philharmonic, Collon

Yet another full Proms house sat down, and of course stood, for a rather strange six course meal which turned out not quite what the menu had led us to anticipate. While it was obvious that the rare and expensive bird dishes were going to be quickly...

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Prom 25: Orfeo, EBS, Gardiner

English choirs and early music ensembles have a bad reputation for stiffness, formality – nothing wrong with the music, just the presentation. But with this dramatic and Italianate Orfeo, John Eliot Gardiner, his English Baroque Soloists and...

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Prom 24: BBCSSO, Runnicles

You never quite know whether a new work by James MacMillan is going to veer towards the masterly or the overblown. His magnificent chain of concertos has arguably yielded masterpieces, but the Third Symphony at the Proms in 2003 sounded like an...

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Prom 23: Verdi's Requiem, BBCSSO, Runnicles

A weekend of extremes at the Proms took us from stark solo Bach on Saturday to the massed forces of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, gathered under Donald Runnicles for Verdi’s Requiem. As a showcase...

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Prom 22: Piemontesi, Aurora Orchestra, Collon

What would you expect of an ensemble performance played from memory? That the odd lapse, entirely understandable over the span of a 40-minute symphony, would be more than offset, perhaps, by gains in intimacy and flexibility as the players could...

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Prom 21: Alina Ibragimova plays Bach (II)

While Friday night’s triptych of solo Bach began and ended in a sombre, contemplative place, the arc created for the second sequence by pairing the final sonata for solo violin with the second and third partitas is altogether more dramatic. In...

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Prom 19: Alina Ibragimova plays Bach

I can’t be alone in often leaving a Proms violin concerto convinced that the Bach encore was the best bit. The Royal Albert Hall is a chameleon space, capable of dwarfing the largest orchestra and muting the weightiest of Wagnerian singers, but also...

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Prom 17: Hallé, Elder

Roger Wright may be gone from the BBC Proms, replaced for now by a committee, but his legacy lives on. His zeal to recover areas of English musical culture that may be considered the festival’s birthright resulted last night in a first Proms...

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Prom 16: Late Night with Radio 1, Pete Tong

After years of pussyfooting around pop, hoping the Pet Shop Boys will write something in a passable classical idiom, the Proms has embraced the most euphoric popular genre of all - dance - to its bosom. Pete Tong, long-standing Radio 1 presenter and...

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Prom 14: Prokofiev Piano Concertos

Gergiev’s programme for this concert raised eyebrows when the Proms were announced: all five Prokofiev piano concertos, presented in chronological order, over the course of a long evening. As it turned out, he had some good reasons for his plan. The...

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Prom 13: Josefowicz, BBCSO, Mälkki

A packed Albert Hall told an instructive story: programme Holst’s The Planets at the Proms and you can dare to do anything in the first half. Besides, though it will be a red letter day when we don’t have to put “women” in front of “conductors”, the...

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