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| Date | Event | Composers, Works, Performers |
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| Friday 3-Sep-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 65 BBC Proms |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Friday 3-Sep-10 07:30pm Prom 65 In the first of his two Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Simon Rattle couples Beethoven’s punchy Fourth Symphony – a work packed with drama beneath its sunny surfaces – with Mahler’s First, which recalls the youthful song-cycle heard in Prom 62 while tracing a characteristic Mahlerian scenario of hard-fought triumph over personal doubts and demons. | ||
| Saturday 4-Sep-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 66 BBC Proms |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Saturday 4-Sep-10 07:30pm Prom 66 In the first half of their second Prom, Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic pair late works by two of Germany’s greatest late-Romantics – ‘Richard the First’ and ‘Richard the Third’, as the conductor Hans von Bülow rather wickedly called them (quipping that, after Wagner, there could be no ‘Richard the Second’). After the interval come sensational sonic adventures by the three great musical pioneers of early-20th-century Vienna. Celebrated Finnish soprano Karita Mattila returns to the Proms as soloist in Strauss’s opulently nostalgic reflections on life’s last days. | ||
| Sunday 5-Sep-10 02:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 67 - Last Night of the Proms 1910 BBC Proms |
Paganini, Moto Perpetuo in C major, Op.11 (arr. Pitt) Mussorgsky, Rayok (The Peep Show) (orch. Henry Wood) Bizet, L’Arlésienne (excerpts) Matthews, Dark Pastoral – based on the surviving fragment of the slow movement of Vaughan Williams’s Cello Concerto (1942) (BBC commission: world première) Dvořák, Humoresque in G flat major, Op. 101 No. 7 (orch. Henry Wood) |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Sunday 5-Sep-10 02:30pm Prom 67 - Last Night of the Proms 1910 To open our daylong tribute to Proms founder-conductor HenryWood, we present his own Last Night programme from a century ago – so producing the first Proms season ever to feature two Last Nights. While this parade of short popular classics truly recalls Promenade concerts of another age, we also continue Wood’s commitment to new works – what Wood called his ‘novelties’. So one short cello piece from the original 1910 programme is this afternoon replaced by a brand-new work, based on a movement from the unfinished Cello Concerto by Vaughan Williams. Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich (1839-1881), Rayok (The Peep Show) (orch. Henry Wood) Bizet, Georges (1838-1875), L’Arlésienne (excerpts) Matthews, David (b. 1943), Dark Pastoral – based on the surviving fragment of the slow movement of Vaughan Williams’s Cello Concerto (1942) (BBC commission: world première) Dvořák, Antonín (1841-1904), Humoresque in G flat major, Op. 101 No. 7 (orch. Henry Wood) Jennifer Larmore, Mezzo-soprano Sergei Leiferkus, Baritone Steven Isserlis, Cello BBC Concert Orchestra Paul Daniel, Conductor Price type: Free | ||
| Sunday 5-Sep-10 08:00pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 68 BBC Proms |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Sunday 5-Sep-10 08:00pm Prom 68 To close our HenryWood Day, the Ulster Orchestra and its Principal Guest Conductor PaulWatkins play music either premiered by or closely associated with the founder-conductor of the Proms, opening with the fanfare that Arthur Bliss, the BBC’s then Director of Music, wrote for Wood’s 75th (and last) birthday in 1944, the year of the Proms’ Golden Jubilee. | ||
| Monday 6-Sep-10 07:00pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 69 BBC Proms |
MacMillan, The Sacrifice (Three interludes, London première) |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Monday 6-Sep-10 07:00pm Prom 69 The Royal Scottish National Orchestra and its French-born Music Director, Stéphane Denève, join Paul Lewis as he rounds off his cycle of the five Beethoven piano concertos with the last and most proudly majestic of them all. Taking up this afternoon’s Italian theme, they play spectacular orchestral showpieces by Berlioz and Respighi, inspired respectively by Rome’s lively street life and its imperial past; while, cementing Celtic connections, they introduce a recent symphonic suite drawn from the Scottish composer James MacMillan’s opera The Sacrifice, inspired by the medieval folk tales of The Mabinogion and premiered to great acclaim by Welsh National Opera in 2007. MacMillan, James (b. 1959), The Sacrifice (Three interludes, London première) | ||
| Monday 6-Sep-10 10:00pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 70 BBC Proms |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Monday 6-Sep-10 10:00pm Prom 70 French counter-tenor Philippe Jaroussky and Canadian contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux sing arias and duets by two great masters of 18thcentury opera seria, including a rare extract from one of the works that Handel’s London rival Porpora wrote to show off his star pupil, the legendary castrato Farinelli. | ||
| Tuesday 7-Sep-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 71 BBC Proms |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Tuesday 7-Sep-10 07:30pm Prom 71 In its first visit to the UK since Daniele Gatti became Music Director, the Orchestre National de France presents three great works linked to France and its capital city. Dating from a decade before his symphony of seascapes, La mer, Debussy’s poetic Prélude made its composer’s name when it was premiered in 1894, and created controversy when Nijinsky danced his erotic choreography of it for the Ballets Russes in 1912. A year later the Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring prompted an even more sensational succès de scandale for Diaghilev’s company, causing the most famous riot in musical history. | ||
| Wednesday 8-Sep-10 07:00pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 72 BBC Proms |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Wednesday 8-Sep-10 07:00pm Prom 72 Bruckner, like his hero Wagner, composed on a vast scale. In his third Prom of the season, the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Chief Conductor, JiΣí BΔlohlávek, pairs the dashing festive prelude from Act 3 of Wagner’s ‘swan knight’ romance with the most overarching and open-hearted of Bruckner’s nine symphonies – a work whose slow movement was composed in the shadow of Wagner’s death and enshrines Bruckner’s musical memorial to the man he revered as the ‘Master’. Always a composer of vivid and funky surprises, Tansy Davies promises in her new work to take us on a journey through the Tarot pack. Davies, Tansy, Wild Card (BBC Commission: World Première) | ||
| Wednesday 8-Sep-10 10:15pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 73 BBC Proms |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Wednesday 8-Sep-10 10:15pm Prom 73 To end the season’s Late Night series we celebrate a band of musicians popular for two generations. Penguin Cafe’s quietly insidious blends of catchy material, sophisticated skill and slightly surreal unpredictability have long been familiar to listeners who may never have registered the names of performers or music. Originally dreamt up and fronted by Simon Jeffes until his death in 1997 – and also prompting David Bintley’s successful ballet ‘Still Life’ at the Penguin Cafe – the group’s music has reappeared on the scene thanks to Jeffes’s son Arthur, who has added new pieces to the menu. Joining them is star Northumbrian smallpiper Kathryn Tickell, a past guest of the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Penguin Cafe is the latter-day reincarnation of the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra, founded in 1972 by Simon Jeffes, whose original music for the band music has always been notoriously difficult to describe. ‘I think our recordings have been put in the classical, folk, pop, rock, avant-garde, chill-out, world and dance sections of record shops,’ says Arthur Jeffes, the group’s current leader (and son of Simon Jeffes). ‘One description I like at the moment is that it’s a kind of modern chamber folk – I like that it could apply to the music or the musicians.’ The band boasts an eclectic line-up of instruments, ranging from violin, cello and piano, to ukulele, dulcitone (a keyboard instrument whose hammers strike tuning forks), penny whistles and guitars. Kathryn Tickell, on Northumbrian smallpipes, joins the group for its first Proms appearance. ‘I’m looking forward to playing with Kathryn very much,’ says Jeffes. ‘I’ve been a real fan for a long time. I find the expression she can get into the pipes sounds so effortless, and yet so clear and direct that I can’t listen to her playing without smiling.’ For its Late Night Prom, the ensemble aims to offer ‘a place where one can opt out of the dehumanising pressures of modern life and simply be. Without wanting to sound overly mystical about it, a space where the music can just simply exist.’ | ||
| Thursday 9-Sep-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 74 BBC Proms |
Holloway, Reliquary: Scenes from the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, enclosing an instrumentation of Schumann's ‘Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart’ (BBC commission, World Première) |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Thursday 9-Sep-10 07:30pm Prom 74 To end our Schumann bicentenary survey, Irish pianist Finghin Collins plays the closest thing we have to a second Schumann piano concerto, while Robin Holloway offers a fresh slant on the composer’s final song-cycle, which sets poems and prayers penned in exile and prison by Mary, Queen of Scots. Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic also include masterpieces by two other composers who sadly lived even shorter lives. | ||
| Friday 10-Sep-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 75 BBC Proms |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Friday 10-Sep-10 07:30pm Prom 75 Four hundred years after Monteverdi published his great collection of church music, the assorted choral, vocal and orchestral splendours of what is now universally known as the Vespers of 1610 bring this season’s Venetian strand to its spectacular conclusion. With performers ranged around the Arena and Gallery as well as the main stage, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir return to the music with which they made their Proms debut in 1968, now joined by the expert period instrumentalists of the English Baroque Soloists, and with the additional brass forces of His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts. | ||
| Saturday 11-Sep-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonProm 76 - Last Night of the Proms 2010 BBC Proms |
Dove, A song of Joys (BBC Commission, World Première) Vaughan Williams, Suite for viola and small orchestra (prelude, galop) Zimmer, Theme from Pirates of the Caribbean (dead man's chest and hornpipe) |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Saturday 11-Sep-10 07:30pm Prom 76 - Last Night of the Proms 2010 Tradition meets high jinks as Jiří Bělohlávek conducts his second Last Night, while the spirit of Henry Wood presides, as always, over the grand finale of the Proms. Renée Fleming lends her lustrous soprano to music by Strauss, DvoΣák and Smetana, former Radio 3 New Generation Artist Maxim Rysanov gives Tchaikovsky’s popular cello variations a new voice, and loyal Prommers can spot the last traces of the season’s Wood, Parry, Wagner, Rodgers and Hammerstein and opera themes. A festive new piece by Jonathan Dove opens the evening; a contemporary hornpipe forms an upbeat to anniversary composer Arne’s Rule, Britannia!; and audiences around the UK can join the Royal Albert Hall crowd in singing along to excerpts from Lohengrin and Carousel in a climax to the BBC’s opera season. Dove, Jonathan, A song of Joys (BBC Commission, World Première) Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich (1840-1893), Variations on a Rococo Theme in A major, for cello and orchestra, Op.33 (arr. Rysanov) Smetana, Bedřich (1824-1884), Dalibor (‘Dobrá! Já mu je dám! … Jak je mi?’) Vaughan Williams, Ralph (1872-1958), Suite for viola and small orchestra (prelude, galop) Zimmer, Hans (b. 1957), Theme from Pirates of the Caribbean (dead man's chest and hornpipe) Parry, Hubert (1848-1918), Jerusalem (orch. Elgar) | ||
| Friday 22-Oct-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonThe Great Classics: Rossini, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Friday 22-Oct-10 07:30pm The Great Classics: Rossini, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov A rousing Rossini opening is followed by two great classics of the Russian repertoire, with the legendary John Lill taking to the piano in the most celebrated of Rachmaninov’s four keyboard concertos. The work is supremely confident and exudes a lush romanticism that subsequently counterpointed the railway station romance of the 1945 tear-jerker Brief Encounter. Rimsky-Korsakov displays his orchestral wizardry in the ever-popular Scheherazade. Based upon episodes from The Arabian Nights, this thrilling music conjures up the drama, passion and adventure of those timeless tales, and is still regarded as one of the world’s greatest orchestral showpieces. Tickets £5 - £40 | ||
| Friday 29-Oct-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonElgar at the Royal Albert Hall |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Friday 29-Oct-10 07:30pm Elgar at the Royal Albert Hall England's finest composer in England's finest concert hall. Celebrate the magnificent music of Elgar in the incomparable majesty of the Royal Albert Hall. | ||
| Tuesday 2-Nov-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonThe Great Classics: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Dvořák |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Tuesday 2-Nov-10 07:30pm The Great Classics: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Dvořák Mendelssohn and his family spent the summer of 1844 in the spa town of Soden, and it was during this happy vacation that he completed his superb Violin Concerto. Although it had occupied him for several years, the finished score sparkles with freshness and spontaneity. Dvorák completed his Symphony No.9 in America in May 1893 and it was first performed in December of that year. This ‘musical letter from America’ is both a hymn to the New World and a nostalgic longing for home, expressed most powerfully in the exquisite Goin’ Home melody of the second movement, famously used in the Hovis bread advert. Tickets: £5 - £40 | ||
| Thursday 25-Nov-10 07:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonThe Great Classics: Elgar, Bruch, Holst |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Thursday 25-Nov-10 07:30pm The Great Classics: Elgar, Bruch, Holst Although he composed several choral and orchestral works, Bruch’s fame today rests largely on one phenomenally successful piece – Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor. Richly melodic and sumptuously orchestrated, this enchanting work is beloved of performers and audiences alike. The Concerto is framed by two English masterworks – Elgar’s unashamedly romantic celebration of London and Holst’s extraordinary The Planets. The Suite embraces the martial, the magical and the mystical, with its terrifying visions of war in Mars and the rollicking Jupiter, which gave to the world the song I Vow to Thee, My Country. Tickets: £5 - £40 | ||
| Sunday 3-Apr-11 03:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonThe Great Classics: Tchaikovsky Gala |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Sunday 3-Apr-11 03:30pm The Great Classics: Tchaikovsky Gala The Orchestra pays tribute to the genius of Tchaikovsky in a concert featuring four of his most popular scores. The dramatic Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, for many the most perfect expression of the fate of those star-cross’d lovers, is followed by the Piano Concerto No.1. Arguably the best-known of all Romantic keyboard concertos, with its soaring opening melody supported by massive piano chords, the work finds a thrilling exponent here in Freddy Kempf. We then enter the arena of war with two great showpieces, beginning with the Marche Slave and concluding with the splendours of the 1812 Overture, a vivid celebration of Napoleon’s historic retreat from Moscow in that year, complete with a colourful firework finale. Tickets: £5 - £40. | ||
| Sunday 26-Jun-11 03:30pm |
Royal Albert Hall, LondonThe Great Classics: Smetana, Grieg, Orff |
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| Royal Albert Hall, London, London, United Kingdom Sunday 26-Jun-11 03:30pm The Great Classics: Smetana, Grieg, Orff Grieg’s glorious Piano Concerto is one of the great war-horses of the repertoire. Modelled on Schumann’s Concerto, the work is coloured by Grieg’s growing interest in Norwegian folk music, and has even survived Eric Morecambe’s comedy television rendition with conductor ‘Andrew Preview’! When Orff found his true compositional voice with Carmina Burana in 1937, he asked his publisher to destroy everything he hitherto brought out. In these powerful settings of thirteenth-century lyrics Orff realised his vision of a kind of music theatre that combined primitive dance rhythms with symbolic, ritualised drama. The work is framed by the shattering chorus O Fortuna, which laments the unpredictable turns of fortune. Tickets: £5 - £40. | ||