BBC Proms Season 72, Episode 1: First Night of the Proms

BBC Young Musician 40th Anniversary

BBC Young Musician celebrates its 40th birthday with a concert featuring illustrious past winners and finalists, including Nicola Benedetti, Freddy Kempf and Sheku Kanneh-Mason, as well as this year’s winner. With music by Ravel and Saint-Saëns.

180 min

Jacob Collier and Friends

23-year-old vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and arranger Jacob Collier is already a multi-Grammy Award-winner. Here he teams up with Jules Buckley, the Metropole Orkest and special guests Sam Amidon and Take 6 for a special Proms performance.

180 min

Youthful Beginnings

Mendelssohn’s precocious First Piano Concerto joins Schumann’s forward-looking Fourth Symphony and music by Lili Boulanger and Morfydd Owen – both of whom died tragically young – in the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s first Prom of the season.

180 min

Pioneers of Sound

The London Contemporary Orchestra leads a late-night tribute to the legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – pioneers of experimental electronic music – which includes Daphne Oram’s groundbreaking Still Point and music by RW stalwart Delia Derbyshire.

180 min

Beethoven, Shostakovich & Rachmaninov

Karina Canellakis directs the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two Russian classics: Rachmaninov’s exhilarating Symphonic Dances and Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, with Alisa Weilerstein as soloist. Beethoven’s spirited overture Coriolan opens the concert.

180 min

Paul Lewis plays Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ concerto

A concert of darkness and light opens with the world premiere of Tansy Davies’s 9/11-inspired What Did We See? and closes with Brahms’s sunny Second Symphony. Paul Lewis joins Ben Gernon and the BBC Philharmonic for Beethoven’s 'Emperor' Concerto.

180 min

Parry, Vaughan Williams & Holst

Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending and Pastoral Symphony sit alongside music by Holst and Parry’s stirring Fifth Symphony in this centenary celebration of Hubert Parry – father of 20th-century English music. Martyn Brabbins conducts the BBC NOW.

180 min

Havana Meets Kingston

Leading reggae and dancehall producer Mister Savona brings together some of Cuba and Jamaica’s most influential musicians for a concert combing the sounds of roots reggae, dub and dancehall with son, salsa and Afro-Cuban to create a new musical fusion.

180 min

Folk Music around Britain and Ireland

The BBC Concert Orchestra collaborates with some of the folk world’s leading musicians, including Julie Fowlis, The Unthanks and Sam Lee, in a concert that celebrates traditional music while also looking to the future of this ever-evolving genre.

180 min

NYO perform Mussorgsky, Ligeti and Debussy

George Benjamin and the National Youth Orchestra in a concert of orchestral masterworks that includes Debussy’s La Mer and Ligeti’s mesmerising Lontano. Pianist Tamara Stefanovich is the soloist in Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand.

180 min

Brahms's A German Requiem

Richard Farnes conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soloists Golda Schultz and Johan Reuter in Brahms’s much-loved Requiem. Marking Thea Musgrave’s 90th birthday, the performance opens with her dramatic Phoenix Rising.

180 min

New York: Sound of a City

Celebrating the music of a modern New York, the Heritage Orchestra and conductor Jules Buckley present the sound of NYC. With guest artists drawn from across the Big Apple, expect anything from pagan-gospel and disco-punk to feminist rap or DIY indie.

180 min

Edward Gardner conducts Elgar & Vaughan Williams

The conflict of war runs through this concert by Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Vaughan Williams’s beautiful cantata Dona nobis pacem and Lili Boulanger frame Elgar’s elegiac Cello Concerto.

180 min

Sir Simon Rattle conducts L’enfant et les sortilèges

Ravel’s magical opera The Child and the Spells follows his fairy-tale ballet Mother Goose and the oriental aura of Shéhérazade.

180 min

Mozart's Clarinet Concerto & Mahler's Fifth Symphony

Recreating a Prom conducted by Leonard Bernstein in 1987, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Thomas Dausgaard pair two of the best-loved and most beautiful works in the repertoire: Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

180 min

Iván Fischer & Budapest Festival Orchestra (II)

Dance to the Gypsy rhythms of Hungarian folk music in works by Liszt and Sarasate, while Brahms’s dramatic First Symphony, with its transcendent finale, is at the heart of this second concert by Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

180 min

John Wilson conducts Bernstein's On the Town

Launching a Bernstein bank-holiday weekend on what would have been the composer’s 100th birthday, John Wilson conducts Bernstein’s hit Broadway musical On The Town, which follows the adventures of three sailors on shore leave in 1944.

180 min

Marin Alsop & Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Bernstein-protégée Marin Alsop returns to the Proms with one of the great American symphony orchestras to perform a politically charged programme that includes Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony alongside Bernstein’s own Second Symphony.

180 min

Sir András Schiff plays 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' (Book 2)

Following his performance of Book 1 in 2017, distinguished pianist and Bach specialist Sir András Schiff returns to present the complete Book 2 of J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.

180 min

Youssou Ndour & Le Super Étoile de Dakar

Senegalese cultural icon Youssou Ndour makes his Proms debut in a special late-night appearance. He’s joined by his group Le Super Étoile de Dakar for a performance embracing his signature mix of Cuban rumba, hip hop, jazz and soul.

180 min

Tango Prom

Explore the raw sensuality and charged rhythms of the tango in all its guises. The Britten Sinfonia join forces with a tango band to take the dance from its dusty beginning in the streets of Buenos Aires right up to the present day.

180 min

Last Night of the Proms - Part One

The BBC Proms 2018 season comes to a close with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their much-loved former chief conductor and Last Night of the Proms veteran Sir Andrew Davis steering proceedings live from the Royal Albert Hall. Long-standing nautical traditions of the evening are extended in Stanford's Songs of the Sea, featuring Canadian baritone Gerald Finley. The centenary of the end of the Great War is marked with a new work from Roxanna Panufnik, which also rounds off the season's original premieres and features BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus. The evening includes music by Hindemith, Berlioz and Charles Hubert Parry, who is celebrated 100 years after his death with a performance of Blest Pair of Sirens. Coverage also includes visits to Proms in the Parks across the Nation, also celebrating this annual great night in classical music.

104 min

Last Night of the Proms - Part Two

Katie Derham presents live coverage as the Last Night of the Proms continues from the Royal Albert Hall with the ever-popular Marche militaire francaise by Saint-Saens. Award-winning 18-year-old saxophonist Jess Gillam performs Scaramouche by Milhaud, and baritone Gerry Finley performs the song Soliloquy from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel. To mark 100 years since 1918 there is a nationwide sing-around of traditional First World War songs, with contributions from the Proms in the Park events in Colwyn Bay, Glasgow and Belfast. The 2018 Proms are brought to a familiar and much-loved rousing close with Rule Britannia, Land of Hope and Glory, and Jerusalem. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and BBC Singers are conducted by Sir Andrew Davis.

90 min

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