tue 29/07/2025

Classical Reviews

Prom 31, Barnatan, Minnesota Orchestra, Vänskä - American classics take centre-stage

Bernard Hughes

Prom 31 featured an American orchestra playing an all-American programme – until the final encore dived thrillingly into a completely different musical tradition. But one of the principal features of American music – its joyous risk-taking – was undermined by conductor Osmo Vänskä’s cautious tempos, and the orchestral playing only periodically caught fire.

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Proms at...Cadogan Hall 4, Connolly, Middleton review - perfect partnering in the unfamiliar

David Benedict

“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry. With their own “vibrations”, great poems rarely warrant musical interference; bad poetry, meanwhile, can resist even the finest scoring.

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Proms 29 / 30, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Dausgaard review - Bach Brandenburgs and beyond

Sebastian Scotney

A complex Swedish product to unpack, this one. Someone in the BBC must have worked out that it could do with a detailed instruction manual to help people with the task: the programme booklet duly ran to a full 50 pages.

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Prom 28, National Youth Orchestra, Benjamin review - micro-music from a mega-band

Boyd Tonkin

Anyone who came to the National Youth Orchestra’s annual Prom in the hope of hearing some roof-raising feelgood blockbuster might have slunk out disappointed into the tropical night of Kensington. What an ambitious, high-concept menu Sir George Benjamin slated for the teenaged regiment – over 160 of them at full strength – and how confidently they served (almost) all of it.

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Proms 25 / 26 review - Russian masters, noodling guitar, late-night perfection

David Nice

Sometimes the more modestly scaled Proms work best in the Albert Hall. Not that there was anything but vast ambition and electrifying communication from soprano Anna Prohaska and the 17-piece Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini, making that 18 when he chose to take up various pipes (★★★★★).

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Prom 21, BBC Scottish SO, Volkov review - horncalls and mountainscapes

Gavin Dixon

This concert was inspired by the huge scale of the Albert Hall. The three works all evoke spacious vistas, through their expansive textures, echo effects and horn calls.

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theartsdesk at the Three Choirs Festival - religion, passion and Nordic fakery

stephen Walsh

Not to be outdone by the Proms, the 2018 Three Choirs Festival in Hereford burst into action on Saturday with a major choral work, the Mass in D, by music’s most famous suffragette, the majestic figure of Dame Ethel Smyth

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Prom 19, Ten Pieces review – creative format engages young audiences

Gavin Dixon

Children’s concerts are a tricky business, but the BBC has hit on a good formula with its Ten Pieces project, now in its fifth year.

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Prom 17, Murray, BBC NOW, Brabbyns review – pastoral vistas, with dark shadows

Gavin Dixon

Two of the major themes in this year’s Proms season are the hundredth anniversaries of the death of Hubert Parry and the end of the First World War. This programme brought those two ideas together, with two works by Parry himself, along with pieces influenced by the war and written in its aftermath by Parry’s pupils Holst and Vaughan Williams.

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Prom 16, Elder, Hallé – reason yoked to magic on one enchanted evening

Boyd Tonkin

Beguiling echoes, patterns and symmetries accompanied the Hallé on this Proms journey through the enchanted forests of orchestral sound.

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