The fascination of the East has been a constant in classical music’s history, from the jangling sounds of the Janissary bands to Mozart’s Seraglio, Sheherazade’s dreamy tales to Britten’s seductive gamelan. Last night’s Prom gave the East a chance to answer back, setting Nishat Khan’s new Sitar Concerto in dialogue with Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony – a musical portrait of a landscape rather closer to home.Getting us into the mood, Holst’s short tone poem Indra was something of an oddity. Anyone expecting swirling Orientalist fantasy would have been disappointed by the rather anonymous Read more ...

It makes a lot of sense for the National Youth Orchestra to give the first ever free Prom. Both, one assumes, economically but also in terms of ethos and atmosphere. New and tentative concert goers would have had very little cause to be intimidated by the fresh faces on the Albert Hall stage last night. That’s thing about youthful energy – you can’t fake it. The same goes for musical quality, or course, and thankfully the NYO has bags of that too.Vaughan Williams’s Toward the Unknown Region showed off the beautifully rehearsed choirs, making controlled and expressive use of dynamic range Read more ...

Mahler, who like most of us thought Bach was “the greatest of them all” and studied in depth the edition of his complete works, would have been delighted by last night’s extravaganza – a true celebration of what makes the Proms the much quoted “biggest music festival in the world”. Only two Bach oratorios – cantatas in all but name – could possibly follow, after a sizeable break for supper, the Mahler symphony, his Second, which ends in such a blazing resurrection. It’s disappointing, then, to record that while there was so much to enjoy in both concerts, the expected transportation on angel Read more ...

Precious few musicians can instill such a sense of intimacy into their playing as to have us believing that the Royal Albert Hall is the Wigmore Hall and that their performance is for an audience of one and not six thousand. Mitsuko Uchida is among the select few. Indeed there were feats of projection in pianissimo during her performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons that I’m not sure any other living pianist can achieve in quite the same way. It’s the quality of the soft playing, the limpidity and beauty of the sound Read more ...

There had been a buzz of anticipation about this late-night Prom by Nigel Kennedy, the Palestine Strings and his Orchestra of Life, and it was completely sold out. After a long association with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and 2.4 million sales of the 1989 album, Nigel Kennedy doesn't seek or need either forgiveness or permission to open the doors of this music to other tendencies.“Let's just do it” is the approach he defines in the programme, where he also praises the young players (their ages range from 12 to 23) of the Palestine Strings for the “rich, wholehearted and unique” spirit in which Read more ...

It’s hard to find an overarching theme to last night’s Prom from John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic. We veered from a solidly patriotic opening (Walton, Rubbra) through the high romance of Bruch’s Violin Concerto to the murkier stylistic no man’s land of Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp. Musical emotions were running universally high however, and the cumulative effect was dramatic in the moment, but oddly unsatisfying on reflection.There was nothing equivocal about the Bruch however, showcasing the talents of the young Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang. Frang is the real deal, as serious a Read more ...

It was mostly Russian night at the Proms, and mostly music you could dance to, as a hand jiving Arena Prommer rather distractingly proved in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony. Even Prokofiev’s elephantine Second Piano Concerto was transformed into the ballet music Serge Diaghilev thought it might become in 1914. Much of this was thanks to the fleet feet and mobile shoulders of febrile BBC Philharmonic conductor Gianandrea Noseda. But even he could do very little with the odd man out in every way, Edward Cowie’s Earth Music I.One blunt question has to be asked: why a BBC commission Read more ...

On the one occasion I went to Bayreuth, I made the mistake of seeing The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin after the best of Ring cycles. At the Proms we’ve had a week of serious Wagnerian withdrawal symptoms, so Tannhäuser was never going to feel like too much or too little of a good thing. In any case, this always fascinating if dramatically primitive early clash of sex and religion is shot through with later passages composed in between work on the Ring, most of them included in last night's 1875 hybrid version. And Donald Runnicles is not a conductor to stand in the shadow of Daniel Barenboim Read more ...

You wait years for a live performance to test whether Tippett’s Second Symphony is a masterpiece, and then two come along within six months. Both are due to the missionary zeal of the BBC Symphony Orchestra management, determined to give an overshadowed English composer a voice in Britten centenary year. But while Martyn Brabbins convinced me totally of the Second’s dynamic journey back in April at the Barbican, Oliver Knussen caught its rarefied sounds but not always its progressive sense. Many listeners might have left with a feeling of “very lovely at times, but is that really a symphony?” Read more ...

Reviewing last night’s Prom of British Light Music feels a bit like getting all AA Gill on your granny’s Victoria sponge. The collage of musical morsels from Bantock, Arnold, Coates and Elgar is music made with love, for pleasure, by composers who rated enjoyment over admiration. It’s music that smothers critical appraisal gently but firmly in its tweed-clad bosom, killing you with musical kindness. It’s also music that needs Xenakis-like precision if it is to come off, and more pep even than that.It’s a combination we’ve come to expect from the John Wilson Orchestra who batter their way into Read more ...

And so Wotan’s ravens flew home and at the twilight’s last gleaming the immortals were consumed by fire and water. All was finally and irrevocably redeemed by the power of love, and the most beautiful of all the leitmotifs in Wagner’s Ring rolled out across the Albert Hall like a benediction. It was a defining moment in Proms history, no doubt, and was greeted with a few moments of perfect - and I mean perfect - silence.After minutes of rapturous applause, Daniel Barenboim spoke spontaneously and without a microphone to the huge capacity audience (pictured below). He talked of the way Read more ...

Such has been the justifiable flow of superlatives this week about the Berlin Staatskapelle's Ring conducted by Barenboim, the centrepiece of the BBC Proms' Wagner bicentenary celebration, it would have been easy to forget that the 2013 Proms season contains not just those four, but seven complete Wagner operas.Last night's performance of Tristan und Isolde was placed – respecting the chronological order in which Wagner composed them - between the Berliners' Siegfried on Friday and Götterdammerung on Sunday.The performance which Bychkov coaxed from all sections of the BBCSO was a fabulous Read more ...