In a moving short programme interview, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra's Principal Guest Conductor Anja Bihlmaier sums up the essence of her miraculous way with Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth): "I find it is both a work about saying farewell and a celebration of being fully present in the moment." The orchestral musicians were unforgettably present in the rainbow of moods and moments, as was tenor Clay Hilley. Mezzo Jamie Barton, the promised star of the evening, was harder to catch, though that may have been something to do with hearing her from the side. The Read more ...

Miles Davis’s centenary this year has led to some fascinating work. The MILES play with Jay Phelps at Southwark Playhouse Borough in February – reviewed here – has been the most thought-provoking of the ventures so far. The Theo Croker Mixtape at the Festival Hall In March had only the briefest and most cursory glimpses of Miles, but did welcome Gary Bartz to blast us from the past. Ingrid Jensen was on imperious form with the Porgy and Bess album re-creation at Guildhall in May. But this BBC Prom was the big one, the XXL celebration with Ambrose Akinmusire and his quartet and full orchestra Read more ...

Last year, Chineke! delivered one of the Proms’ more hard-hitting offerings, in a programme including Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, “50 minutes of brutality, despair and terror”, and Valerie Colman’s Fanfare for Uncommon Times, reflecting on the COVID pandemic and social upheaval. This year, by contrast, they blended nostalgia with unfettered escapism, mixing Dvořák’s uncharacteristically cheerful Symphony No. 8 in G major with the glitz and glamour of songs including Gershwin’s "Love Is Here to Stay" and Irving Berlin’s "Puttin’ on the Ritz".  Conductor and Chineke! Interim Artistic Read more ...

After a century of trail-blazing Black musicians across every genre, it’s dumbfounding to discover that clarinettist Anthony McGill is the first African-American principal in the New York Philharmonic. He did have distinguished predecessors in the orchestra: in 1962 the remarkable violinist Sanford Allen became its first permanent Black member, and stayed until 1977. Without diminishing McGill’s signal achievements, it would be reasonable to say that, half a century later, he has had a slightly smoother path to follow.  Image That path Read more ...

It's a reviewer's unkind luxury to moan about having to sit through yet another performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto simply to hear a rarer work; there will always be audience members, especially among the 5000 in the Royal Albert Hall, who'll never have heard the concerto live. Yet it's also a singular masterpiece, and last night Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández plumbed its melancholy depths and keenly reflected Vasily Petrenko's nuanced Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at every point. This was the perfect link between more-than-curtain-raiser Webern and Walton's fascinating Second Symphony. Read more ...

So much has vanished from my memory of the time I had a half-season Arena Proms pass back in 1982, but not the performance of Berlioz's Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts) with the four brass bands placed at compass points of the Albert Hall, emulating the composer's original positionings in Saint-Louis des Invalides. I awaited the same with rather childish glee for Antonio Pappano's marshalling of a large orchestral and choral army. It was not to be: two of the bands were left and right, respectively above the women and the men of the combined London Symphony and BBC Symphony Choruses, the Read more ...

On paper, this Prom looked like a well-stocked display-case for collective choral virtues. Baroque wizard Peter Whelan (pictured below) led the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in a rare first-half outing for the intensely dramatic Miserere in C minor by the Bohemian contemporary of Bach and Handel, Jan Dismas Zelenka. The second gave us the dependable vocal glories of Haydn’s “Nelson” Mass, retrospectively named for the Admiral after he (with Emma Hamilton in tow) visited the Esterházy court in 1800. Indeed, the OAE singers (and players) crafted properly Read more ...

Poor Oberon! An opera scorned so long as weird and silly,A mash-up of outlandish tales all chucked in willy-nilly.Now brave Sir Mark (the Elder one) rides out to save its name. On Albert Hall’s broad field, will he win immortal fame And glorify the final work of Carl Maria Von Weber – Or leave the Prommers fretting over so much wasted labour?OK, I’ll stop there. Timothy Knapman’s new narration for Oberon replaced the original dialogue by James Robinson Planché – universally dismissed as a calamitous botch – with corny, witty jingling heptameters that irresistibly Read more ...

Last night’s Prom saw two beloved favourites – Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony – prefaced by a fairly unknown quantity. This was Bernd Alois Zimmerman’s rediscovered Fairy-Tale Suite, written for radio by the German composer in 1950 but never performed until 2001. Unmistakably haunted by war-time nightmares, it takes us spine-tinglingly deep into some truly menacing woods. Sadly, the magically gifted Alina Ibragimova – soloist in the Mendelssohn – had to fight her way through thickets of her own as Elena Schwarz allowed a robust and well-muscled BBC Read more ...

Had you been at John Wilson's Respighi spectacular on Friday, or heard it on BBC Radio 3/watched it on BBC Four, you might have perceived last night's journey up and down Richard Strauss's Bavarian alp as an extension of Albert Hall possibilities, complete with vast orchestra, offstage bands and full-blaze organ. While Wilson skilfully ran the gamut from ferocious blazes to the subtlest watercolour sketches, Edward Gardner encouraged the London Philharmonic Orchestra to go deep beneath the surface of Eine Alpensinfonie and takes its time in the long lines admiring the wonder of nature.  Read more ...

You never quite know what to expect from the acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall. It was hard to credit the total focus Kazuki Yamada drew from his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra right from the start of Poulenc's Sinfonietta - a precision which carried through to an exhilarating performance of the Concerto for Two Pianos with a stunning sibling duo. Adams' now-classic choral blockbuster Harmonium, on the other hand, sometimes benefitted from the halo of sound, but the combined masses of the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and the CBSO chorus couldn't give us many of the words of John Donne Read more ...

Forget Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with bells, cannons and military bands (most people have, but it was my introduction to the Albert Hall as a child). Respighi's raucous festivals, sparkling fountains and various pines of Rome are where the real spectacular action is, with more music and poetry than Tchaikovsky found in that occasional piece. Who better than John Wilson and his superorchestra Sinfonia of London to urge the cavalcades and weave the magic in the ultimate Proms blockbuster? Surprisingly, it's not the first time the tall and massive order of all three sets of symphonic Read more ...