Proms

Errollyn Wallen is the composer of 22 operas, and counting, as well as numerous concertos, symphonies, song cycles and chamber works. Her music has been performed at major public celebrations such as the late Queen’s golden and diamond jubilees and the 2012 Paralympic Games. In 2022, she was in the top 20 most performed living composers worldwide. Her first orchestral commission, a concerto for percussion and orchestra, was performed at the Proms in 1998. This was, as she notes modestly in a footnote in her new book, the…

When Felix Klieser was four he made a decision: he was going to learn the french horn. “Nobody knows where I’d even heard about this instrument,” he laughs. “There is nobody musical in my family. We never went to concerts. My parents didn’t even know what a french horn looked like!”Göttingen, the small city in the middle of Germany where Klieser grew up, boasts just one music school. A teacher there, conscious of the fact that the horn is a very physical instrument, requiring impressive lung capacity and strong lips,…

For the first time in its history the BBC Proms season will be opened and closed by female conductors, as the festival moves towards gender equality.The opening and closing nights will be led by Dalia Stasevska and Marin Alsop respectively, two of 10 women conducting concerts this year, three making their Proms debut.“We’re moving in the right direction towards equitable representation,” said the Proms director, David Pickard, “but it’s a slow process.”Meanwhile, 11 of this year’s 21 premieres are by female composers,…

Another week, another foray beyond BBC Proms HQ. The latest Prom to leave the Royal Albert Hall was an “operatic experience” at Printworks London – once the largest printing factory in western Europe, and since 2017 reincarnated as a massive club and gig venue. It’s the kind of cavernous space that generates its own electric atmosphere long before any performance starts. (More’s the pity that this first Prom at the Printworks will also be the last: the entire complex is now set to close to allow for “redevelopment”.) As…

Sakari Oramo’s Prom of English music with the BBC Symphony Orchestra opened with the overdue UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Time Flies. A co-commission by the BBC, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie, it was written in 2019 as a celebratory piece for the Tokyo Olympics the following year, though its planned multiple premieres were all initially shelved due to Covid and subsequent travel restrictions. The first performance finally took place in Hamburg last year. Tokyo, for…

Santtu-Matias Rouvali took up his post as principal conductor of the Philharmonia in September last year. His opening season has included some memorable performances, especially of Strauss and Tchaikovsky, and so it was rather odd that for his first appearance with the orchestra at the Proms – Rouvali’s debut there, too – he should have opted for such an undemanding programme. Extracts from two of the most popular ballet scores – Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet – were separated by a novelty, the…

“I’ve missed you,” Marin Alsop exclaimed to the Proms audience – and for the last three summers the Proms has missed her. She’s a natural here, playing off the curious informal grandeur the festival brings to this space each summer. Her orchestra, though, were Proms first-timers. Alsop took over as the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra’s music director in 2019, and their programme showcased a taut ensemble responsive to their conductor.The frenetic opening of the suite from Bartók’s sleazy ballet The Miraculous Mandarin…

It’s quite a feat for a British ensemble older than the Proms to be making its debut at this year’s festival, but such is the case of Tredegar Town Band. Formally constituted in 1876, and with a performing CV stretching from Rambert Ballet to Matthew Warchus’s Bafta-winning film Pride, there’s a sense of making up for lost time with not one, but two Tredegar Proms this week . First, the band teams up with BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Ryan Bancroft for Gavin Higgins’ massive Concerto Grosso for Brass Band and…

With a stirring rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem, the first concert of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra came to an end in Warsaw late on Thursday evening amid thunderous applause from a packed house at the Polish National Opera. It was hard to believe that two weeks ago this orchestra did not exist and that these musicians had never played together.The 74 musicians, all Ukrainian, come from many different orchestras inside the country and elsewhere across the world. They assembled in Warsaw 10 days before the…

The summer hiatus is the time to sample star players of the past and hear how performance styles have changed. The latest release on the Biddulph label, specialists in historic string players, is Nathan Milstein: The US Armed Forces Recordings. Born in Odesa, Milstein (1904-92) left Russia and became an American citizen, also familiar on the concert platforms of Europe. In Massenet’s Méditation from Thaïs – here in two versions – the Ukrainian violinist’s sweetness of tone, elegance and lyrical slides (portamento) define…