19:00 BBC Proms (m000kx6f)
First Night of the BBC Proms 2020
Friday 17 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Tonight sees the launch of six weeks of highlights from the past three decades of the Proms, featuring memorable performances from an array of the world’s greatest soloists, orchestras and conductors.

Marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, we open with a mash-up of Beethoven’s nine symphonies – a First Night commission by Iain Farrington recorded in lockdown by a Grand Virtual Orchestra formed of around 320 players from across the BBC Performing Groups. The Beethoven celebrations continue with the dramatic Piano Concerto No. 3 performed at the 2017 First Night by Igor Levit, who has more recently reached a new audience through his live Twitter concerts streamed direct from his Berlin apartment during the coronavirus lockdown.
Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s riotous, hard-hitting Panic – for saxophone, drums and orchestra – won instant notoriety following its premiere at the Last Night of the 100th-anniversary Proms season in 1995.
Tonight’s selection concludes with Claudio Abbado’s final Proms appearance, in 2007, conducting the 127 players of his Lucerne Festival Orchestra in a rapturous performance of Mahler’s epic hymn to nature, his Third Symphony.

7.05pm
Ian Farrington: Beethoveniana (BBC commission: world premiere)
Grand Virtual Orchestra (BBC Performing Groups)

c.7.15pm
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor
Igor Levit, piano
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Edward Gardner, conductor
(From the First Night of the BBC Proms 2017, 14 July)

c.7.50pm
Sir Harrison Birtwistle: Panic
John Harle, saxophone
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sir Andrew Davis, conductor
(From the Last Night of the BBC Proms 1995, 16 September)

c.8.20pm
Mahler: Symphony no 3
Anna Larsson, mezzo-soprano
Trinity Boys Choir
London Symphony Chorus
Lucerne Festival Orchestra
Claudio Abbado, conductor
(From BBC Proms 2007, 22 August)

15:00 BBC Proms (m000l289)
Christian Thielemann conducts the Staatskapelle Dresden
Saturday 18 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Presented by Kate Molleson

The Staatskapelle Dresden and its Chief Conductor Christian Thielemann open with Beethoven’s most radiant, smiling work, his sublime Violin Concerto, in the sure hands of Nikolaj Znaider.

After the interval this famously rich-toned orchestra digs into Max Reger’s affectionate and beautifully orchestrated Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart and finally Richard Strauss’s witty and abrasive depiction of an impish figure from German folklore, his outlandish tone-poem telling of ‘Till Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks’.

Beethoven: Violin Concerto

Interval: Kate Molleson in conversation with Christian Thielemann.

Reger: Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart
R. Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks

Nikolaj Znaider (violin)
Staatskapelle Dresden
Christian Thielemann (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2016, 8 September)

18:30 BBC Proms (m000l28f)
Beethoven's Leonore - a landmark performance
Saturday 18 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Beethoven: Leonore
(From BBC Proms 1996, 16 August)
Beethoven’s only opera is a passionate musical protest against political oppression that also celebrates the power of human love. This performance from 1996 of the opera’s first version (it was later revised as Fidelio) was only its second ever at the Proms, and the first featuring period instruments. Sir John Eliot Gardiner favoured this earlier version of the work, conceived at a time when Beethoven was fired up by the ideals of Napoleon and the social fragmentation of society in the wake of the French Revolution. This performance came soon after the experience of recording all of Beethoven's symphonies with his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. The period instruments, he said, gave the music ‘greater transparency of texture, more sharply differentiated character of the instruments and an almost visceral struggle with the musical material.'

Presented by Martin Handley.

Leonore.....Hillevi Martinpelto (soprano)
Florestan.....Kim Begley (tenor)
Rocco.....Franz Hawlata (bass)
Marzelline.....Christiane Oelze (soprano)
Jaquino.....Michael Schade (tenor)
Don Pizarro.....Matthew Best (bass)
Don Fernando.....Geert Smits (baritone)
First Prisoner.....Robert Burt (tenor)
Second Prisoner.....Colin Campbell (baritoner)
Monteverdi Choir
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique
Sir John Eliot Gardiner (conductor)

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

13:00 BBC Proms (m000l1y9)
Proms Chamber Music: Jeremy Denk
Sunday 19 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Bartók: Piano Sonata
Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 9, 'Black Mass’
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111

Jeremy Denk (piano)

(From BBC Proms 2015, 24 August)

Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists – a musician the New York Times hails as someone ‘you want to hear no matter what he performs’. In 2015 he put Beethoven’s final piano sonata at the core of his debut Proms recital. This majestic work – which he later recorded for a 2019 disc entitled ‘c.1300–c.2000’ – blends extrovert passion with a depth that characterises all of the composer’s late works.

Denk paired the Beethoven with Bartók’s only piano sonata – a piece strongly coloured by Hungarian folk melodies and rhythmic attack – and Scriabin’s ‘Black Mass’ Piano Sonata. His most famous work in the genre, Scriabin’s sonata is a disconcerting, phantasmagoric musical journey – and a gleeful vision of horror.

18:15 Proms Preview (m000l1yk)
A Week at the Proms - Programme 1
Sunday 19 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Starting a series of six weekly programmes, Georgia Mann explores the coming week's Proms together with a group of guests, including Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director of the Barbican Centre; Gillian Moore, Director of Music at Southbank Centre, and Helen Wallace, Artistic Director at Kings Place. As Radio 3 opens its rich archives during the summer, the guests offer tips, recommendations and rediscoveries in a unique chance to hear some historic and memorable recordings. The most significant people and events coming up in the week ahead are put under a spotlight, and the guests react to both archive interviews and fresh material recorded especially for the programme.

21:00 BBC Proms (m000l1yp)
Beethoven’s Missa solemnis
Sunday 19 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Presented by Tom Service

Finding the terror alongside the spiritual awe, the questioning doubt as well as the faith, Beethoven’s mighty Missa solemnis is a work of visceral power – a public statement of intensely private belief. ‘From the heart – may it return to the heart!,’ the composer wrote at the top of a score that stretched the proportions and ambitions of the orchestral Mass to new limits.

A work close to Harnoncourt’s heart, the Missa solemnis was also the work he conducted in his final public performance before retiring in December 2015. Experience the raw intensity of his account here with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Arnold Schoenberg Choir at the 1998 BBC Proms.

Beethoven: Missa solemnis

Chamber Orchestra of Europe
Arnold Schoenberg Choir
Ruth Ziesak (soprano)
Bernarda Fink (alto)
Herbert Lippert (tenor)
Neal Davies (bass)
Nikolous Harnoncourt (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 1998, 11 September)

13:00 BBC Proms (m000l1m6)
Proms Chamber Music: Apollon Musagète Quartet
Monday 20 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Webern: Langsamer Satz
Colin Matthews: String Quartet No. 5 (European premiere)
Beethoven: String Quartet in D major, Op. 18 No. 3

Apollon Musagète Quartet

(From BBC Proms 2015, 3 August)

Presented by Petroc Trelawny.

Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists the Apollon Musagète Quartet present the European premiere of the Fifth String Quartet by one of Britain’s foremost living composers, Colin Matthews. Commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival in 2015, the piece remains the last work Matthews has written in the medium.

Bookending the Quartet are Webern’s youthful Langsamer Satz – an ecstatic piece that showcases the composer’s formal skill within a lyrical idiom – and Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18 No. 3. Of Beethoven’s six Op. 18 quartets, No. 3 is both the lightest and the hardest to pin down: the scherzo is fleeting, and even the framing movements have an unusual delicacy and wistfulness about them.

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000l1m8)
Summer Festivals
Monday 20 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

A new series of great Proms concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs, launched by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Concert Orchestra. Presented by Fiona Talkington.

Prokofiev: Symphony No 1 in D major (Classical Symphony)
Qigang Chen: Iris Dévoilée (London premiere)
with Meng Meng, Anu Komsi and Piia Komsi (sopranos), Jia Li (pipa), Jing Chang (zheng) and Nan Wang (erhu)
Rachmaninov: Symphony No 2 in E minor
BBC NOW
Conductor Xian Zhang

George Benjamin: Ringed by the Flat Horizon
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by the composer

Throughout the 2020 Proms season Afternoon Concert celebrates top music-making at Summer Festivals, with four weeks of concerts from 2019 summer festivals across Europe and four weeks of great Proms performances from recent years by the BBC Orchestras and Choirs. This week features all six BBC-associated orchestras including the Ulster Orchestra, plus the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus; the BBC National Chorus of Wales will feature in two weeks' time. The series will also celebrate the 60th birthdays in 2020 of two great British composers, George Benjamin and Mark-Anthony Turnage, and highlight some of the best Proms premieres from James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie in 1990 to the present day.

To launch the series today Chinese-American conductor Xian Zhang makes her Proms debut in a hyper-Romantic 2015 concert featuring two Russian blockbusters and a gorgeous recent work by her compatriot Qigang Chen. Plus George Benjamin conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the piece whose 1980 Proms premiere catapulted him to fame, and film favourites from a 2011 Prom by the BBC Concert Orchestra and their then Principal Conductor Keith Lockhart - who feature throughout this week.

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l1mk)
Leif Ove Andsnes plays Beethoven
Monday 20 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

This evening we've another chance to hear a Prom from 2015 - Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra present Beethoven’s Second and Fifth piano concertos – the composer’s first and final experiments in the genre. In No 2, a spacious and gentle central adagio is framed with Mozartean grace in the outer movements, while the Fifth is the composer’s last word on the subject – a musical emancipation of the soloist that anticipates the Romantic concertos of Beethoven’s successors.

Opening tonight’s concert is Stravinsky’s Octet, written for wind ensemble. Looking to the musical past for inspiration once again, Stravinsky’s Neo-classical masterpiece pastiches the forms and textures of the 18th century, colouring them with a mood and mischief all his own.

Presented by Andrew McGregor, who chats to Leif Ove between the two piano concertos.

Stravinsky: Octet
c.7.55pm
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major
c.8.35pm
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major, ‘Emperor’

Mahler Chamber Orchestra
Leif Ove Andsnes (piano/conductor)
(From BBC Proms 2015, 26 July)

22:00 BBC Proms (p02xfqpc)
Proms Lecture - Daniel Levitin: Music and Our Brains
Monday 20 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Before becoming a leading neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin worked as a musician and record producer. In "Unlocking the Mysteries of Music in Your Brain", the Proms Lecture given in front of an audience at the Royal College of Music, he explores the new thinking about the crucial relationship between music and our neural responses.

(From BBC Proms 2015, 18 July)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000l22v)
Summer Festivals
Tuesday 21 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Fiona Talkington presents great Prom concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs - today the BBC Singers in Palestrina and Judith Weir and Ulster Orchestra in Tchaikovsky. Venezuelan Rafael Payare makes his 2016 Proms debut as Principal Conductor and Music Director of the Ulster Orchestra with Tchaikovsky's Fifth and a brand-new work by Professor of Composition at Queens University, Belfast, Piers Hellawell, plus Haydn with the cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan, who was then a BBC New Generation Artist. Plus a 2017 Prom at Southwark Cathedral with Palestrina from BBC Singers and their then chief conductor, David Hill, who are joined by the Nash Ensemble for another world premiere by Master of the Queen's Music Judith Weir.

Piers Hellawell: Wild Flow (world premiere)
Haydn: Cello Concerto No 1 in C major
with Narek Hakhnazaryan (cello)
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 5
Ulster Orchestra
Conductor Rafael Payare

Proms at… Southwark Cathedral
Palestrina: Motet 'Confitebor tibi, Domine'; Missa 'Confitebor tibi'
Judith Weir: In the Land of Uz (BBC commission: world premiere)
with Adrian Thompson (tenor), Stephen Farr (organ) and Nash Ensemble
BBC Singers
Conductor David Hill

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l23b)
The world premiere of John Tavener's 20th-century classic, The Protecting Veil
Tuesday 21 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Kate Molleson introduces a Prom from 1989 conducted by the late Oliver Knussen, one of the most respected figures in British contemporary music. She is also joined by the soloist in tonight's concert, cellist Steven Isserlis.

Knussen composed his Flourish with Fireworks for American conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, to reflect a shared admiration for the music of Stravinsky, here represented in the symphonic poem he made in 1917 from his opera The Nightingale. Song of the Nightingale later became a successful ballet, with choreography by Massine and later Balanchine.

Also premiered were two other works by British composers: the Symphony by Minna Keal; and John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil for cello and orchestra, a radiant expression of Tavener’s faith which, in his own words, attempted to ‘capture some of the almost cosmic power of the Mother of God’. Commissioned by the BBC, it has since become a contemporary classic, having received over a dozen recordings.

Knussen: Flourish with Fireworks
Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Keal: Symphony, Op. 3 (first concert performance of complete work)
Tavener: The Protecting Veil (world premiere)
Mussorgsky: Intermezzo in modo classico (orchestral version)
Stravinsky: Song of the Nightingale

Steven Isserlis (cello)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Oliver Knussen (conductor)

(From BBC Proms, 4 September 1989)

22:00 BBC Proms (b04b2lwg)
Proms Plus
Tavener and Literature
Tuesday 21 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Matthew Sweet and his guests, the award-winning poet and librettist Michael Symmons Roberts and musician, priest and broadcaster Richard Coles, explore the inspiration John Tavener took from poems written by George Herbert, John Donne and William Blake. Tonight's Proms broadcast includes The Protecting Veil, which earnt Tavener a nomination for the Mercury Prize and whilst this work takes its cue from an icon and the Orthodox feast of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God, other pieces by Tavener draw on literary sources.

Originally recorded before an audience at the Royal College of Music at the BBC Proms on 23 July 2014.

22:20 BBC Proms (m000l23m)
Proms Plus
Birds
Tuesday 21 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Helen Macdonald, author of H Is For Hawk and Tim Birkhead, Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield and author of Bird Sense, share their experiences of observing birds closely and their pick of writing inspired by real and fictional birds. Professor Birkhead’s recent research has been into the adaptive significance of egg shape in birds and Helen Macdonald won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book Award for her writing about the year she spent training a goshawk. The presenter is New Generation Thinker Lucy Powell who researches birds in British 18th-century literature. Tonight's Proms concert broadcast ends with a performance of Stravinsky's Song of the Nightingale.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Originally recorded with an audience at BBC Proms on 26 July 2018.

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000l1dr)
Summer Festivals
Wednesday 22 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Hannah French presents great Prom concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs - today Stephen Hough and the BBC Philharmonic play Brahms's mighty First Piano Concerto.

Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor
David Sawer: the greatest happiness principle
Haydn: Symphony No 99 in E flat major
BBC Philharmonic
Conductor Mark Wigglesworth

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l1f2)
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Proms
Wednesday 22 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

The sparkling overture from Rossini’s opera Semiramide opens this Prom given by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, led by Italian maestro Riccardo Chailly. Flexing his Beethoven muscles, Chailly gives his unique reading of the composer’s First Symphony – a work later captured as part of a complete cycle, recorded with the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester from 2007 to 2009.

Rounding off the programme is Prokofiev’s striking Third Symphony. Written in 1928, it was a direct and spirited reaction to the disappointment Prokofiev experienced with his opera The Fiery Angel, whose first performance, accepted by Bruno Walter for Berlin, had been summarily and indefinitely postponed. Though the second act was given in a concert in Paris conducted by Koussevitzky in June 1928, the opera as a whole was not seen until 1954. Prokofiev rescued some of the material by developing it symphonically; the result is a work of great drama and intensity.

Presented by Ian Skelly

Rossini: Semiramide – overture
Beethoven: Symphony No. 1 in C major
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 3 in C minor
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 1990, 11 September)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000l2v7)
Summer Festivals
Thursday 23 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Proms Opera Matinee: Hannah French introduces Michael Tippett's masterpiece The Midsummer Marriage from the BBC SO, BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus conducted by Andrew Davis - an acclaimed performance from the 2013 BBC Proms. Tippett asked T S Eliot to write the libretto for his first opera, but Eliot recommended the composer to try it himself. The result is one of the most unusual but haunting operas ever written, a kind of 1950s Magic Flute. Its three acts are filled with some of the most beautiful operatic music composed since the Second World War, from the chorus's opening hymn to the sun and Mark's rapturous love song to Jenifer through the famous Ritual Dances of Act 2 to the deeply moving aria for the oracle Sosostris at the heart of the final act.

Michael Tippett: The Midsummer Marriage
Mark ….. Paul Groves (tenor)
Jenifer, his fiancée ….. Erin Wall (soprano)
King Fisher, her father, a rich businessman ….. David Wilson-Johnson (baritone)
Bella, his secretary ….. Ailish Tynan (soprano)
Jack, her mechanic boyfriend ….. Allan Clayton (tenor)
Sosostris ….. Catherine Wyn-Rogers (mezzo-soprano)
He-Ancient ….. David Soar (bass)
She-Ancient ….. Madeleine Shaw (mezzo-soprano)
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Andrew Davis

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l2vf)
Mariss Jansons conducts Dvorak and Strauss
Thursday 23 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

The late, great Mariss Jansons and his Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra mark the centenary of Dvořák’s death in a 2004 Prom also featuring a popular tone poem by Richard Strauss. Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Dvořák: Symphony No. 8 in G major
Strauss: Ein Heldenleben

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Mariss Jansons

(From BBC Proms 2004, 30 July)

The late Latvian maestro Mariss Jansons appeared at the Proms in 2004 with his renowned German orchestra, of which he was Chief Conductor from 2003 until the end of his life. Together they present Richard Strauss’s autobiographical showpiece, Ein Heldenleben.

Opening the programme is Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony. Written at his brother-in-law’s estate around 30 miles outside of Prague, the symphony reflects Dvořák’s pastoral surroundings, and gives a flavour of the profusion of ideas to come in his ‘New World’ Ninth.

23:00 BBC Proms (m000l2vh)
Baroque classics from Anne Sofie von Otter and Les Musiciens du Louvre
Thursday 23 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

In this late-night concert from 2003, Anne Sofie von Otter joins French conductor Marc Minkowski and his period-instrument orchestra in a pair of arias from Handel’s mighty opera Ariodante – which they recorded together in 1997 – and one of Bach’s most beautiful and consoling solo cantatas, ‘Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust’.

Rounding off this all-Baroque affair is a colourful selection of dances by Jean-Philippe Rameau, a near-direct contemporary of Bach. The suite, which was compiled by Marc Minkowski, draws from a selection of the French composer’s operas.

Bach: Cantata No 170, ‘Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust’
Rameau: L'apothéose de la dance – suite
Handel: Ariodante: Scherza infida; Doppo notte

Anne Sofie von Otter (mezzo-soprano)
Les Musiciens du Louvre
Marc Minkowski (conductor)

(From BBC Proms, 10 September 2003)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000l2zf)
Summer Festivals
Friday 24 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Hannah French presents great Prom concerts from recent years by BBC Orchestras and Choirs. Today, a feast of 20th- and 21st-century music from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. In this remarkable BBC Prom from 2008, Ilan Volkov - then Principal Conductor of the BBC SSO, now their Principal Guest Conductor - leads a beautifully shaped concert featuring classics of electronic music by the French-American pioneer Edgard Varese and the modern master Jonathan Harvey, plus a Harvey world premiere. The concert is launched by two Proms premieres: from another towering French modernist, Olivier Messiaen, and Harvey's tribute to him on the centenary of his birth.

Jonathan Harvey: Tombeau de Messiaen for piano and tape
Cédric Tiberghien (piano)
Messiaen: Concert à quatre
with Emily Beynon (flute), Alexei Ogrintchouk (oboe),
Danjulo Ishizaka (cello) and Cédric Tiberghien (piano)
Harvey: Mortuos plango, vivos voco; Speakings (world premiere)
Varèse: Poème électronique; Déserts
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Ilan Volkov

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l2zm)
Late Escapes
Hollywood Rhapsody Prom
Friday 24 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts. This evening's concert, from 2013, features Proms favourites John Wilson and his orchestra in a celebration of classic Hollywood film scores.

Connecticut-born child prodigy Alfred Newman’s ‘Street Scene’, from the 1953 classic How to Marry a Millionaire, contrasts with the music of Jewish émigrés Erich Korngold, Max Steiner and Franz Waxman, with suites from Korngold’s swashbuckling score for Robin Hood, Steiner’s nostalgic music for Casablanca and Waxman’s brooding score for A Place in the Sun – all of them Academy Award-winners – making for a red-carpet event.

Presented by Georgia Mann

7.30pm
Newman: Street Scene
Kaper: Confetti
Raskin: Laura - New Suite
Herrmann: Psycho Suite
Herrmann: Salammbo Aria (Citizen Kane)
Korngold: Robin Hood - Suite
Moross: The Big Country

c.8:20pm Interval

c.8:35pm
Steiner: Casablanca - Suite
Various: Main Title - Song Medley
Waxman: A Place in the Sun
Rózsa: Ben-Hur - Suite

Venera Gimadieva (soprano)
Matthew Ford (vocalist)
Jane Monheit (vocalist)
John Wilson Orchestra
John Wilson (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2013, 26 August)

18:30 BBC Proms (m000l7m3)
Wagner's Die Walküre from the 2013 BBC Proms
Saturday 25 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts. This evening, Kate Molleson introduces a performance from the 2013 BBC Proms when Daniel Barenboim conducted the Staatskapelle Berlin and a starry cast in Wagner's Die Walküre, as part of the first complete Ring cycle in a single Proms season.

It was an event which drew unanimous critical and audience acclaim for conductor cast and, not least, the orchestra. As one critic put it: 'there's surely no other ensemble in the world that has this music more deeply ingrained in its collective psyche than the Berlin Staatskapelle. Even with some of the greatest Wagner singers of the present day onstage here, it was the orchestral playing that regularly demanded the attention, whether it was the effortless depth of tone in the strings, the sheer solidity and easy assertiveness of the brass, the perfectly defined pianissimos or the immaculate articulation of every solo detail.'

Wagner: Die Walküre

7.30pm: Act 2

9.15pm: Act 3

Bryn Terfel (Wotan)
Simon O'Neill (Siegmund)
Anja Kampe (Sieglinde)
Eric Halfvarson (Hunding)
Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde)
Ekaterina Gubanova (Fricka)
Sonja Mühleck (Gerhilde)
Carola Höhn (Ortlinde)
Ivonne Fuchs (Waltraute)
Anaïk Morel (Schwertleite)
Susan Foster (Helmwige)
Leann Sandel-Pantaleo (Siegrune)
Anna Lapkovskaja (Grimgerde)
Simone Schröder (Rossweisse)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Die Walküre, the second instalment of Wagner's epic four-opera cycle The Ring, opens with a terrible storm presaging the devastating events which are about to unfold, as the gods fall prey to all too-human flaws. Siegmund, who has been asked by his father Wotan to help him acquire the Ring, meets and falls in love with his long-lost twin sister Sieglinde. Fricka, Wotan's consort, is infuriated and demands Siegmund's death. Brünnhilde, Wotan's rebel daughter, tries to defend him, but in punishment she is put to sleep on a rock surrounded by fire.

13:00 BBC Proms (m000l71z)
English choral music new and old
Sunday 26 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s long association with the Proms is reflected in this concert from 2013, in which Nicholas Kok conducts the UK premiere of The Moth Requiem for women’s voices, alto flute and three harps, a dream-like incantation of the names of the dustier cousins of the sun-loving butterfly.

Before that, pre-Reformation motets by William Cornysh and Walter Lambe, preserved in the Eton Choirbook, intersperse with alluring works by Gustav Holst and his daughter Imogen, including the third set of Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda for female voices and harp,

Presented by Petroc Trelawny.

Gustav Holst: Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda – Group 3
William Cornysh: Ave Maria mater Dei
Imogen Holst: Hallo, my fancy, whither wilt thou go?
Walter Lambe: Stella caeli
Sir Harrison Birtwistle: The Moth Requiem (BBC co-commission with the Danish National Vocal Ensemble: UK premiere)

BBC Singers
Nash Ensemble
Nicholas Kok (conductor)

(From BBC Proms, 12 August 2013)

18:15 Proms Preview (m000l726)
A Week at the Proms - Programme 2
Sunday 26 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In the second programme of this series Georgia Mann explores the coming week's Proms concerts with guests Nigel Simeone, Fiona Maddocks and Edward Seckerson as they react to archive performances, hear fresh interviews and select recommendations. Among the topics in discussion are Roger Norrington performing Beethoven Symphony No. 2 with the London Classical Players; Steven Sondheim's 80th birthday celebration Prom; Murray Perahia playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Bernard Haitink; and Janacek's 'The Makropulos Affair' with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jiri Belohlavek, starring Karita Mattila - we hear an interview with her, recorded for the programme, on portraying the diva Emilia Marty and about performing at the Proms in this critically acclaimed performance.

21:00 BBC Proms (m000l72d)
Late Escapes
BBC Proms: Monteverdi's Vespers
Sunday 26 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

French period instrument collective Pygmalion make their 2017 Proms debut in Monteverdi’s iconic Vespers of 1610. Presented by Kate Molleson.

Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610
Giuseppina Bridelli (soprano)
Eva Zaïcik (mezzo-soprano)
Emiliano Gonzalez‐Toro (tenor)
Magnus Staveland (tenor)
Virgile Ancely (bass)
Renaud Bres (bass)
Geoffroy Buffière (bass)
Ensemble Pygmalion
Director Raphaël Pichon
(From BBC Proms 2017, 31 July)

Before there was Bach's Mass in B minor or Beethoven's Missa solemnis there was Monteverdi's Vespers, a choral masterpiece of unprecedented musical scope and audacious beauty. The work's textural extremes, multiple choirs and sonic effects are brought richly to life in this 2017 Proms performance marking the 450th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

This concert was the Proms debut of award-winning French Baroque ensemble Pygmalion under its director Raphaël Pichon, together with an exciting line-up of young soloists.

13:00 BBC Proms (m000l79b)
Proms Chamber Music: Emmanuel Pahud
Monday 27 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Martinů: Flute Sonata
Dutilleux: Sonatine
Prokofiev: Flute Sonata
Emmanuel Pahud (flute)
Eric Le Sage (piano)

(From BBC Proms 2011, 22 August)
Presented by Catherine Bott

Emmanuel Pahud – principal flute of the Berlin Philharmonic and a featured artist at the 2011 Proms – returned following a concerto appearance earlier the same Proms season for a recital of pieces composed in the 1940s.

Martinů's amiable Sonata plumbs unexpected depths in its central core, while the Prokofiev Sonata's delightfully sunny nature makes it an ideal vehicle for the brilliant sparkle of the flute.

In between comes the Sonatine by Dutilleux, here at his most pastoral and Debussyan, carrying the flag for the Paris Conservatoire tradition of commissioning new scores for its final examinations.

Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists the Apollon Musagète Quartet present the European premiere of the Fifth String Quartet by one of Britain’s foremost living composers, Colin Matthews. Commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival in 2015, the piece remains the last work Matthews has written in the medium.

Bookending the Quartet are Webern’s youthful Langsamer Satz – an ecstatic piece that showcases the composer’s formal skill within a lyrical idiom – and Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18 No. 3. Of Beethoven’s six Op. 18 quartets, No. 3 is both the lightest and the hardest to pin down: the scherzo is fleeting, and even the framing movements have an unusual delicacy and wistfulness about them.

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l79n)
Beethoven and Schubert from Roger Norrington
Monday 27 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Sir Roger Norrington conducts his period instrument London Classical Players in symphonies by Beethoven and Schubert.

Where some musicians follow trends, Roger Norrington has always led them, not least in his long collaboration with the London Classical Players, the orchestra he formed to explore the playing styles relating to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Berlioz. In this 1989 Prom, Schubert's monumental 'Great' symphony - once praised for its 'heavenly length'- is paired with early Beethoven.
Presented by Hannah French.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 2 in D major

Schubert: Schubert: Symphony No. 9 in C major, ‘Great’

London Classical Players
Sir Roger Norrington (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 1989, 21 August)

Sir Roger Norrington's ‘Experiences’ were one of the defining features of the UK's musical life in the 1980s. In these hugely popular events, Sir Roger and his London Classical Players offered music, talk and provocative discussion and brought new insights into works from the Classical and Romantic periods, seen then as the preserve of the traditional symphony orchestras. It is no exaggeration to say that performance style of Beethoven and Schubert has not been the same since.

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l6lt)
Haitink and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Tuesday 28 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Murray Perahia and Bernard Haitink have a musical rapport that has given us countless magnificent performances. This performance from the BBC Proms in 2008 saw Perahia return to the Proms, following a gap of 20 years, to perform one of Mozart's greatest piano concertos.

It was while writing his Fourth Symphony that Shostakovich was denounced in a newspaper article entitled ‘Muddle Instead of Music’. He continued composing the work in private, but it had to wait 25 years – beyond the death of Stalin – before it was first heard in public, in 1961.

Presented by Ian Skelly

7.30pm
Mozart: Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor, K491

c.8.10pm
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 in C minor

Murray Perahia (piano)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2008, 9 September)

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l8xs)
Mahler's Sixth Symphony
Wednesday 29 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts. Tonight's prom finds two contrasting heroes sharing the limelight in an evening of musical drama from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its then new Chief Conductor, Andris Nelsons. Brett Dean’s trumpet concerto Dramatis personae, composed for tonight’s soloist, Swedish virtuoso Håkan Hardenberger, assigns all roles to the trumpet, casting him by turns as fallen superhero and accidental revolutionary. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony sees the composer himself as cursed hero – one, he explained, ‘on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled’. The conclusion may be a tragic one but there are also scenes of beauty and joy in a work that includes a glowing theme associated with Mahler’s wife, Alma.

Presented by Hannah French

7.30pm
Brett Dean: Dramatis personae

c.8.05pm
Interval

c.8.20
Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A minor

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2015, 22 August)

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l96c)
Mark Elder and the Hallé
Thursday 30 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Works inspired by the sea and night-time, plus Beethoven’s barnstorming ‘Eroica’ Symphony - Mark Elder conducts the Hallé in a classic BBC Prom from August 2014.
The sunshine glitters on the waves in Berlioz’s overture Le corsaire, while the ocean ebbs and flows in Elgar’s Sea Pictures. Human rather than natural drama is what drives Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, however – a stirring musical meditation on heroism and valour. Presented by Hannah French.

Berlioz: Overture ‘Le corsaire’
Elgar: Sea Pictures, Op. 37
with Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano)
Helen Grime: Near Midnight (London premiere)
Beethoven: Symphony No 3 in E flat major, ‘Eroica'
Hallé
Sir Mark Elder

(From BBC Proms 2014, 9 August)

The sea lies the centre of tonight’s concert from Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé. Berlioz composed his swashbuckling overture Le corsaire on holiday by the Mediterranean Sea in Nice.

A celebrated Elgar champion, Elder is joined by British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote for Sea Pictures: Elgar’s only orchestral song-cycle, which explores the fascination and fear inspired by the sea. While Helen Grime’s Near Midnight explores a nocturnal theme, Beethoven created a storm of human drama in his ‘Eroica’ Symphony.

22:00 BBC Proms (m000l96f)
Proms Plus
Sea Journeys and Sea Voyages
Thursday 30 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

Edith Hall and Sir Barry Cunliffe, Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford, consider epic sea journeys in history and the role of the sea in Greek myth and legend. Hosted by Rana Mitter. Tonight's Proms concert broadcast includes pieces by Berlioz and Elgar with a maritime theme.

Recorded in front of an audience at the BBC Proms on 28 July 2017.

22:20 BBC Proms (b01m0pmb)
Proms Plus
Russian Literature, Faith and Doubt
Thursday 30 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

The novelist Pat Barker and the Reverend Giles Fraser explore what Russian literature from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy can teach us about faith, doubt and redemption, with readings from their personal favourites. Ian McMillan presents.

Producer Laura Thomas

Recorded with an audience at the BBC Proms 21 August 2012.

23:00 BBC Proms (m000l96j)
Late Escapes
Nils Frahm and A Winged Victory for the Sullen
Thursday 30 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

For this late night Prom first broadcast in 2015, 6Music's Mary Anne Hobbs presents performance featuring the influential German composer-performer Nils Frahm and the American duo A Winged Victory for the Sullen.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Presented by Mary Anne Hobbs

Nils Frahm (piano/keyboards)
Members of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance
A Winged Victory for the Sullen
London Brass

Nils Frahm and the American duo A Winged Victory for the Sullen are musicians who explore the borderlands of classical music. All made their Proms debut in 2015. Mary Anne's interest in these artists was piqued when she noticed the seismic effect their music had whenever she played it on her 6Music weekend breakfast show.

19:30 BBC Proms (m000l8zn)
Stephen Sondheim 80th birthday Prom
Friday 31 July 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Marking the 80th birthday in 2010 of one of Broadway's great innovators, this first ever Sondheim Prom drew together leading figures of the opera and theatre worlds, plus an array of special guests. Bryn Terfel had previously proved himself a magnetic Sweeney Todd in performances at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2007.

Terfel led a strong cast, joined by aspiring young performers supported by the BBC Performing Arts fund. On the bill were excerpts from for horror opera Sweeney Todd, the Ingmar Bergman-inspired. A Little Night Music and the fairy-tale compendium of Into the Woods, as well as excerpts from Company, Pacific Overtures and Sunday in the Park with George.

Presented by Georgian Mann

Simon Russell Beale (vocalist)
Dame Judi Dench (vocalist)
Daniel Evans (vocalist)
Maria Friedman (vocalist)
Caroline O'Connor (vocalist)
Julian Ovenden (vocalist)
Jenna Russell (vocalist)
Bryn Terfel (bass-baritone)
Proms Sondheim Ensemble

BBC Performing Arts Fund Singers
BBC Concert Orchestra
David Charles Abell (conductor)

18:30 BBC Proms (p08k9fgd)
Janáček's The Makropulos Affair
Saturday 01 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.
Karita Mattila stars in a concert performance of Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Affair, a drama of immortality, death and the purpose of life, conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek with the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Janáček: The Makropulos Affair (concert performance; sung in Czech)
Emilia Marty ..... Karita Mattila (soprano)
Albert Gregor ..... Aleš Briscein (tenor)
Dr Kolenatý ..... Gustáv Beláček (bass)
Vítek ..... Jan Vacík (tenor)
Kristina ..... Eva Štěrbová (soprano)
Baron Jaroslav Prus ..... Svatopluk Sem (baritone)
Janek ..... Aleš Voráček (tenor)
Hauk-Šendorf ..... Jan Ježek (tenor)
Stage Technician ..... Jiří Klecker (bass)
Cleaning Woman ..... Yvona Skvárová (mezzo-soprano)
Chambermaid ..... Jana Hrochová (mezzo-soprano)
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Orchestra

Jiří Bělohlávek (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 2016, 19 August)

An all-star cast gathers for Janáček’s late, existential masterpiece, The Makropulos Affair. This tragic satire is powered by a score that contains some of the composer’s most extreme and alluring music, written as Janáček was approaching 70 – and aflame with desire for a married woman less than half his age. The opera’s heroine, Emilia Marty, is part-inspired by his reluctant muse, Kamila Stösslová.

The Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, acclaimed for her ‘electrifying’ portrayal of Marty in a 2012 production at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, is joined by native Czech musicians, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s former Conductor Laureate Jiří Bělohlávek. This is only the second performance of The Makropulos Affair at the Proms – the first being Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s 1995 production under Sir Andrew Davis.

13:00 BBC Proms (p08l2lz4)
A celebration of Henry Purcell
Sunday 02 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

The centrepiece of this concert – introduced by Suzy Klein and originally presented to celebrate the 350th anniversary year of Purcell’s birth in 2009 – is an affecting tribute to the composer by his teacher and predecessor as organist of Westminster Abbey, John Blow. It sets Dryden’s poem of the same name, which describes how ‘the lark and linnet sing’ but then fall silent at the appearance of ‘the matchless man, our Orpheus’.

A sequence of Purcell’s solo songs and keyboard pieces and the deeply moving Evening Hymn complete this mix of mellifluous music, performed by English singers Iestyn Davies and Simon Wall. The duo are accompanied by members of the Academy of Ancient Music, led from the harpsichord by their Artistic Director Richard Egarr.

Purcell: Suite in G major – excerpts
Purcell: Hail, Bright Cecelia – ’Tis nature’s voice
Purcell: A New Ground
Purcell: Music for a while
Purcell: Suite in D major – excerpts
Purcell: Sweeter than roses
Blow: Ode on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell
Purcell: Evening Hymn

Iestyn Davies (countertenor)
Simon Wall (tenor)
Members of the Academy of Ancient Music
Richard Egarr (harpsichord/director)

(From the BBC Proms, 7 September 2009)

18:15 Proms Preview (m000lgwk)
A Week at the Proms - Programme 3
Sunday 02 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

An exploration of the coming week's Proms

21:00 BBC Proms (p08k9gxy)
Elgar, Bax and Walton from the 2006 BBC Proms
Sunday 02 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts and tonight Martin Handley presents an all-English programme from the 2006 season conducted by the much-missed Richard Hickox.

Elgar: In the South (Alassio)
Bliss: A Colour Symphony
Walton: Belshazzar's Feast
(From the BBC Proms 2006, 23 July)

Bryn Terfel (bass-baritone)
BBC National Chorus of Wales
London Symphony Chorus
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
London Brass
Richard Hickox (conductor)

Ever the champion of British music, Richard Hickox conducts his final Prom at the helm of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, joined by Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and massed choirs from London and Cardiff in the Old Testament fire-and-brimstone tale of Belshazzar's Feast. Walton’s mighty cantata was commissioned by the BBC in 1929, originally as a small-scale choral work. It soon outgrew its conception, morphing into a musical behemoth for orchestra, eight-part choir, organ and two brass bands.

Commissioned at the behest of Elgar – whose own In the South (Alassio) opens this concert – Bliss’s A Colour Symphony explores the heraldic associations of the colours purple, red, blue and green. Hickox and BBC NOW would go on to record the work in 2006, alongside Bliss’s Violin Concerto.
Presented by Martin Handley.

13:00 BBC Proms (p08k9hp9)
Proms Chamber Music: Khatia Buniatishvili
Monday 03 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor
Liszt: Liebesträum No. 3 in A flat major
Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 7 in B flat major
Chopin: Preludes, Op. 28 – No. 4 in E minor

Khatia Buniatishvili (piano)

(From the BBC Proms 2011, 8 August)
Presented by Catherine Bott

Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Khatia Buniatishvili has for years been turning heads with her mesmerising stage presence and unique style of pianism, mixing uncanny sensitivity with old-school fireworks. In this recital she explores the different brands of virtuosity perfected by three composer-pianists, Chopin, Liszt and Prokofiev.

Liszt’s B minor Piano Sonata, dedicated to Schumann, is considered by many to be his finest work, whilst his Liebesträum No. 3 is one of his most popular – the quintessential Romantic piano miniature. Buniatishvili recorded both as part of her 2011 disc Liszt: Piano Works, which was released shortly before this chamber performance. Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, meanwhile, contains some of the most dynamic music ever devised by a composer renowned for his motoric piano style.

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000ldb3)
Summer Festivals
Monday 03 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore presents great BBC Prom concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs - today the BBC Philharmonic with music by Pärt, Rachmaninov and Gliere, from a 2007 Prom. The climax of their concert with conductor Vassily Sinaisky is the Proms premiere of the monumental Third Symphony by Russian composer Reinhold Gliere, inspired by legendary folk hero Ilya Muromets. Plus ecstatic music by Welsh composer Grace Williams from a 2015 Prom given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

2.00pm
Arvo Pärt: Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
with Nelson Goerner (piano)
2.30pm
Gliere: Symphony No 3 in B minor, Op 42 (Ilya Muromets) (Proms premiere)
BBC Philharmonic
Conductor Vassily Sinaisky

3.55pm
Grace Williams: Fairest of Stars
Ailish Tynan (soprano)
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Conductor Tadaaki Otaka

Throughout the 2020 Proms season Afternoon Concert celebrates top music-making at Summer Festivals, with four weeks of concerts from 2019 summer festivals across Europe and four weeks of great Proms performances from recent years by the BBC orchestras and choirs. This week features all six BBC-associated orchestras including the Ulster Orchestra, plus the BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC National Chorus of Wales. The series also celebrates the 60th birthdays in 2020 of two great British composers, George Benjamin and Mark-Anthony Turnage (on Thursday this week), and highlights some of the best Proms premieres from James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie in 1990 to the present day.

19:30 BBC Proms (p08k9k11)
Daniel Barenboim and his West–Eastern Divan Orchestra
Monday 03 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts. Tonight, a memorable concert from the 2016 season, when Daniel Barenboim paired his orchestra of young Arabs and Israelis with the iconic pianist Martha Argerich in a thundering performance of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto. The concert begins with a work by Jörg Widmann. Entitled Con brio, it harnesses the energy of Beethoven’s fast movements in an ‘exercise in fury and rhythmic insistence’. Barenboim – who conducted Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Proms in 2013 – concludes with powerful excerpts from three of the composer’s most popular works.

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Jörg Widmann: Con brio
Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major

c. 8.10pm
Interval

c.8.25pm
Wagner: Tannhäuser – Overture
Wagner: Götterdämmerung – Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey
Wagner: Götterdämmerung – Siegfried's Death and Funeral March
Wagner: The Mastersingers of Nuremberg – Overture

Martha Argerich (piano)
West–Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 2016, 17 August)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000lgbs)
Summer Festivals
Tuesday 04 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore presents great BBC Prom concerts by BBC orchestras: the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with Wagner and Strauss and Ulster Orchestra with Beethoven and Clara Schumann.

In a Prom from 2018 the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and their Chief Conductor are joined by Swedish soprano Malin Byström for Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs and by the National Youth Chamber Choir and London Voices for the UK premiere of Per Nørgård's Symphony No 3.

Then, recorded at last year's Proms, the Ulster Orchestra and their outgoing Chief Conductor Rafael Payare perform Russian music, Beethoven's First Symphony and a Proms premiere: Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto, with Radio 3 New Generation Artist Mariam Batsashvili as soloist.

2.00pm
Wagner: Parsifal – Prelude to Act 1
Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs
with Malin Byström (soprano)
Per Nørgård: Symphony No 3 (UK premiere)
London Voices
The National Youth Chamber Choir
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Thomas Dausgaard

3.25pm
Beethoven: Symphony No 1 in C major, Op. 21
Clara Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 (Proms premiere)
Sofia Gubaidulina: Fairytale Poem
Shostakovich: Symphony No 1 in F minor, Op. 10
Mariam Batsashvili (piano)
Ulster Orchestra
Conductor Rafael Payare

19:30 BBC Proms (p08k9kr5)
Sibelius's epic Kalevala
Tuesday 04 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

This evening, Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo pairs two of Sibelius’s most engagingly descriptive works as part of a Proms season that marked 150 years since the composer’s birth. The folk hero Kullervo was the inspiration behind a powerful national statement for a country struggling to overthrow Russian rule. This massive musical hybrid – part cantata, part symphony, part suite – is a vivid work, richly melodic but looking ahead to modernism in some striking musical gestures.

The opening work, En saga, is a fairy tale without a plot, whose contrasting movements suggest many possible stories, but never commit to just one. Sibelius began working on the piece in 1891, soon after returning from musical studies in Vienna and Berlin. It wasn’t until 1902, however, that he completed the version we know today.

Presented by Ian Skelly.

Sibelius: En saga
Sibelius: Kullervo

Johanna Rusanen (soprano)
Waltteri Torikka (baritone)
Polyteknikkojen Kuoro
BBC Symphony Chorus (men's voices)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo (conductor)
(From the BBC Proms 2015, 29 August)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000lgrq)
Summer Festivals
Wednesday 05 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore presents great BBC Prom concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs: today Pierre Boulez conducts his own music plus works by Varèse and Stravinsky - the original version of his ballet Petrushka - in a Prom given in 2002.

2.00pm
Varèse: Intégrales
Boulez: Le visage nuptial; Le soleil des eaux
Stravinsky: Petrushka (1911 version)
Francoise Pollet (soprano)
Susan Parry (mezzo-soprano)
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Pierre Boulez

19:30 BBC Proms (p08k9m04)
Beethoven, Barber and Copland from the 2007 BBC Proms
Wednesday 05 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts ant tonight martin Handley introduces a concert from the 2007 season featuring the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop in a programme including two American 20th-century classics.

Beethoven: Overture ‘Leonore’ No. 3
Barber: Violin Concerto
Copland: Symphony No. 3

James Ehnes (violin)
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Marin Alsop (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 2007, 25 July)

New York-born Marin Alsop conducts a programme that reflects the substantial body of American works introduced to the BBC Proms during the 1940s and 1950s. Barber’s lushly romantic Violin Concerto – which received its UK premiere at the 1943 Proms – is heard alongside Copland’s iconic folk-influenced symphony, a work which helped define the sound of American orchestral music.

Opening the concert is Beethoven’s third attempt at a curtain raiser for his only opera, Leonore (later renamed Fidelio). Despite being rejected for a fourth and final iteration, this overture perfectly encapsulates the essence of Beethoven’s opera: a proud celebration of freedom and conjugal love.

Presented by Martin Handley

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000lhdy)
Summer Festivals
Thursday 06 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore with great BBC Prom concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs: today the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Messiaen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing Turnage.

Today's programme features two major choral-orchestral works. From a Prom given in 2008, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and their then Principal Conductor Thierry Fischer are joined by massed choirs and seven instrumental soloists in Messiaen's gigantic La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. Plus, from the 2017 Proms, the European premiere of Hibiki by Mark-Anthony Turnage, who celebrates his 60th birthday this year.

2.00pm
Messiaen: La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ
Adam Walker (flute)
Julian Bliss (clarinet)
Sonia Wieder-Atherton (cello)
Adrian Spillett (marimba)
Colin Currie (xylorimba)
Richard Benjafield (vibraphone)
Gerard Bouwhuis (piano)
Philharmonia Voices
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC National Chorus of Wales
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Conductor Thierry Fischer

3.50pm
Mark-Anthony Turnage: Hibiki (European premiere)
Sally Matthews (soprano)
Mihoko Fujimura (mezzo-soprano)
Finchley Children's Music Group
New London Children's Choir
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Kazushi Ono

19:30 BBC Proms (p08k9m6p)
Academy of St Martin in the Fields at the Proms
Thursday 06 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Hannah French presents a highlight of the 1994 season.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 96 was written during the composer’s first visit to London and was premiered in Hannover Square, just two miles from where the Royal Albert Hall now stands. The lightest of the 12 symphonies he wrote in the city, its four movements perfectly capture the elegance and wit that brought Haydn such popularity in London society. His virtuosic First Violin Concerto, performed in this concert by the Japanese-born violinist Mayumi Seiler, was written two decades earlier, in the early years of his employment at the Esterházy court.

Sir Neville Marriner and his Academy of St Martin in the Fields conclude with a performance of the Fourth Symphony by Haydn’s frustrated pupil, Beethoven. Despite being written at the same time as his better-known Fifth, the symphony is classical in proportion, its bubbling finale imbued with the spirit of Beethoven’s teacher.
Haydn: Symphony No. 96 in D major, ‘Miracle’
Haydn: Violin Concerto No. 1 in C major
Beethoven: ‘Ah! pérfido’
Beethoven: Symphony No. 4 in B flat major

Adrianne Pieczonka (soprano)
Mayumi Seiler (violin)
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Sir Neville Marriner (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 1994, 15 August)

23:00 BBC Proms (p08k9mgq)
Late Escapes
Pioneers of Sound
Thursday 06 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts. Tonight's concert takes a recent glance back to a Prom from just a few years ago, celebrating some of the great pioneers in electronic music. Daphne Oram’s visionary Still Point fills the Royal Albert Hall for the first time in the premiere of a revised realisation. Composed in 1949 – almost a decade before Oram co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – the piece is thought to be the first to combine a live orchestra with live electronic manipulations, here played via turntables.

Still Point forms the centrepiece of a late-night sonic exploration that features works by Delia Derbyshire – another Radiophonic Workshop pioneer, who achieved cult status for her electronic arrangement of the Doctor Who TV theme – as well as new works inspired by the Radiophonic legacy.

Presented by Kate Molleson

Delia Derbyshire: The Delian Mode
CHAINES: Knockturning (world premiere of new arrangement for orchestra)
Laurie Spiegel: Only Night Thoughts (world premiere)
Suzanne Ciani: Improvisation on Four Sequences
Daphne Oram: Still Point (world premiere of revised version)

Shiva Feshareki (turntables/electronics)
James Bulley (live mix/electronics)
Suzanne Ciani (synthesiser)
CHAINES (live electronics)
London Contemporary Orchestra
Robert Ames (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 2018, 23 July)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000lfl3)
Summer Festivals
Friday 07 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore with great Prom concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs - today Nigel Kennedy plays Elgar's Violin Concerto with the BBC Concert Orchestra.

2.00pm
Bax: The Garden of Fand
Finzi: Intimations of Immortality (Proms premiere)
with Andrew Kennedy (tenor)
BBC Symphony Chorus
2.55pm
Elgar: Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61
Nigel Kennedy (violin)
BBC Concert Orchestra
Conductor Paul Daniel

19:30 BBC Proms (p08krgbn)
Sir Simon Rattle conducts Rachmaninov and Stravinsky
Friday 07 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Georgia Mann presents this concert from 2014, Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic perform an all-Russian programme inspired by dance. Opening the concert is Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances – the composer’s blazing ‘final spark’ and, for many, his finest orchestral work. Embracing jazz, plainchant and the waltz, it is a mercurial showcase of dramatic skill.

In the second half we enter the Russian fairy-tale world of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, the vivid, folk-infused ballet score for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes that established the young composer as a rising star.

Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances
Stravinsky: The Firebird

Berlin Philharmonic
Sir Simon Rattle
(From the BBC Proms, 5 September 2014)

18:30 BBC Proms (p08k9nd2)
Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades
Saturday 08 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Presented by Andrew McGregor.

Tchaikovsky: The Queen of Spades

Yuri Marusin (Hermann)
Sergei Leiferkus (Tomsky)
Dimitri Kharitonov (Prince Yeletsky)
Felicity Palmer (Countess)
Nancy Gustafson (Lisa)
Enid Hartle (Governess)
Anne Dawson (Chloe)
Glyndebourne Chorus
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Andrew Davis (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 1992, 26 July)

At the time Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra as well as Music Director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera, newly knighted Sir Andrew Davis brought his distinguished East Sussex opera company to the Royal Albert Hall in 1992 for the Proms premiere of Tchaikovsky’s chilling supernatural tale of obsession and revenge, based on Pushkin. Nancy Gustafson, who made a memorable Proms appearance (alongside Felicity Palmer) two years earlier as Janáček’s Katya, sings Lisa to the Hermann of leading Russian tenor Yuri Marusin; while Palmer – who was created DBE the following year – added Tchaikovsky’s Countess to her long list of distinguished roles.

13:00 BBC Proms (p08kr8ry)
Nicola Benedetti and Friends play Brahms's First Piano Trio
Sunday 09 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

When not performing as a soloist, violinist Nicola Benedetti appears frequently as a chamber musician – most often with the trio she co-founded with pianist Alexei Grynyuk and cellist Leonard Elschenbroich. Here the three musicians pair Brahms’s first and stormiest piano trio – its darkness belying the work’s major key – with music composed in 2013 by American-born composer Arlene Sierra. Inspired by the migration patterns of butterflies, her Butterflies Remember a Mountain is a work of pointillist detail and shimmering harmonies, painted in a sequence of delicate textural gestures.

Presented by Petroc Trelawny.

Brahms: Piano Trio No 1 in B major
Arlene Sierra: Butterflies Remember a Mountain

Nicola Benedetti (violin)
Leonard Elschenbroich (cello)
Alexei Grynyuk (piano)

(From BBC Proms 7 September 2015)

18:15 Proms Preview (m000llhg)
A Week at the Proms - Programme 4
Sunday 09 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Georgia Mann explores the coming week's Proms, in the company of Flora Willson, Nigel Simeone and Roderick Williams. In a week featuring Renée Fleming singing Strauss, a new work by Colin Matthews and a whole host of concerts from Scottish ensembles, they react to archive performances and select recommendations.

21:00 BBC Proms (p08k9p0m)
Music championed by, or written in memory of, Richard Hickox
Sunday 09 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Britten's Variations is one of many British pieces championed by the late Richard Hickox, two of whose distinguished vocal collaborators, Ian Bostridge and Roderick Williams, are featured in Colin Matthews's new work, which Hickox commissioned.

Mozart’s Requiem was left incomplete at the composer’s early death, its deathly tread and radiant hope adding to its symbolism as Mozart’s musical epitaph.

Presented by Martin Handley.

Britten: Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge
Colin Matthews: No Man’s Land (world premiere)
Mozart (compl. Sussmayr): Requiem in D minor

Emma Bell (soprano)
Renata Pokupić (mezzo-soprano)
Ian Bostridge (tenor)
Roderick Williams (baritone)
Henk Neven (bass)
Polyphony
City of London Sinfonia
Stephen Layton (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2011, 21 August)

19:30 BBC Proms (p08k9q26)
Renée Fleming's Proms Debut
Monday 10 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

In this her Proms debut, star soprano Renée Fleming performed music by two composers with whom she has long been associated – a florid Mozart motet and Strauss’s ravishing final songs, which were given their premiere at the Royal Albert Hall.

Christoph Eschenbach also conducted Richard Strauss’s colourful tone poem inspired by the lothario Don Juan, and Brahms’s classically elegant variations on the ‘St Anthony Chorale’, a theme thought at the time to have been penned by Haydn.

Presented by Ian Skelly

Dvořák: Carnival Overture
Brahms: Variations on the St Anthony Chorale
Mozart: Exsultate, jubilate
R. Strauss: Don Juan
R. Strauss: Four Last Songs

Renée Fleming (soprano)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Christoph Eschenbach (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2001, 1 August)

19:30 BBC Proms (p08kv97h)
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
Tuesday 11 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Messiaen’s ecstatic, Eastern-influenced celebration of love is framed by a BBC commission from American talent Nico Muhly and British composer Anna Meredith’s acclaimed tour de force of clapping, stamping, singing and body percussion, first performed earlier the same year by NYO members.

Varèse’s Tuning Up is a tongue-in-cheek parody based on the familiar orchestral strains usually heard on stage only before the conductor arrives.

Presented by Georgia Mann.

Edgard Varèse: Tuning Up
Nico Muhly: Gait (BBC commission: London premiere)
Messiaen: Turangalîla Symphony
Anna Meredith: HandsFree

Cynthia Millar (ondes martenot)
Joanna MacGregor (piano)
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
Vassily Petrenko (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2012, 4 August)

19:30 BBC Proms (p08k9t5n)
Vaughan Williams Symphonies Nos 4, 5 and 6
Wednesday 12 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts. At the 2012 season Andrew Manze tackled three very different, powerful symphonies by Vaughan Williams which, whatever their own emotional back-stories, may still be seen as chronicling our national life in troubled times. While he was Associate Guest Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Manze conducted all nine Vaughan Williams symphonies, commenting: "Vaughan Williams is one of those composers some people have fixed ideas about… I’m on a bit of a mission to rehabilitate him in people’s minds as an important figure in the music-making of this country".

Presented by Hannah French

7.30pm
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4 in F minor
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 in D major

c.8.50pm
Interval

c.9.05pm
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 6 in E minor

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Andrew Manze (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2012, 16 August)

19:30 BBC Proms (p08kd549)
Mackerras and Brendel play Mozart
Thursday 13 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra and its then Conductor Laureate Charles Mackerras collaborated with Alfred Brendel on a series of performances and recordings of the piano concertos by Mozart, and they brought the grandest of them all to the Proms in 2001, along with an Italianate Symphony from the late 1770s. The classical strand continued with Schubert's rarely heard early Fourth Symphony, and Stravinsky's neoclassical string concerto.

Presented by Martin Handley

Mozart: Symphony No. 32, K318
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25, K50
Stravinsky: Concerto in D
Schubert: Symphony No.4, ‘Tragic’

Alfred Brendel (piano)
Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Sir Charles Mackerras (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2001, 5 September)

23:00 BBC Proms (p08kd5cq)
Sarah Connolly sings Purcell's Dido
Thursday 13 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts. In a profoundly moving late-night performance from the 2003 season, British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly led an all-star cast in Purcell's most popular opera. The drama portrays the tragedy of human relationships torn apart by fate and divine intervention, while the music - including one of the most heartfelt laments in all opera - powerfully and poignantly expresses the characters' emotions.

Presented by Hannah French

11pm
Purcell: Dido and Aeneas

Christopher Purves (Aeneas)
Sarah Connolly (Dido)
Carolyn Sampson (Belinda)
D’Arcy Bleiker (Sorcerer)
Elizabeth Cragg (Second Woman)
Matthew Beale (Sailor)
Lucy Crowe (Spirit)
Choir of the Enlightenment
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Richard Egarr (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2003, 2 September)

19:30 BBC Proms (p08kd5yd)
CBSO, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
Friday 14 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Petroc Trelawny presents a highlight from the 2017 season.

Beethoven: Overture ‘Leonore’ No. 3
Stravinsky: Violin Concerto in D major
Gerald Barry: Canada (BBC commission: world premiere)
Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C minor

Allan Clayton (tenor)
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (conductor)

(From BBC Proms 2017, 21 August)

The CBSO and Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla explore the theme of political and artistic freedom. Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, written for his rescue opera Fidelio, celebrates the triumph of truth over tyranny in music of radiant beauty, while his Fifth Symphony rewrites the rules for the classical symphony.

In his new work, maverick composer Gerald Barry sets a text from Fidelio’s Prisoners’ Chorus – including the lines ‘Speak softly! We are watched with eyes and ears’, suggesting a resonance with today’s concerns over public surveillance. And Leila Josefowicz amps up the drama in the fierce brilliance of Stravinsky’s neoclassical concerto.

18:30 BBC Proms (p08kd699)
Richard Strauss: Salome
Saturday 15 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

The crushing, five-note dissonance at the grizzly climax of Richard Strauss’s operatic masterpiece – when Salome kisses the severed head of John the Baptist – is one of the most influential moments in 20th-century music. Overnight Strauss redefined the scope of opera, paving the way for modernists such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, both of whom were present at the 1906 Austrian premiere.

In this concert performance from the 2014 Proms, Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles leads the Deutsche Oper Berlin orchestra and a cast that includes Nina Stemme in the title role. Fresh from acclaimed productions in Stockholm and Zurich, the Swedish soprano gives a thrilling account of this blood-curdling tale.

Presented by Kate Molleson

Nina Stemme (Salome)
Samuel Youn (Jokanaan)
Burkhard Ulrich (Herod)
Doris Soffel (Herodias)
Thomas Blondelle (Narraboth)
Ronnita Miller (Herodias's Page)
Paul Kaufmann (1st Jew)
Gideon Poppe (2nd Jew)
Jörg Schörner (3rd Jew)
Clemens Bieber (4th Jew)
Andrew Harris (5th Jew)
Noel Bouley (1st Narazene)
Carlton Ford (2nd Nazarene)
Marko Mimica (1st Soldier)
Tobias Kehrer (2nd Soldier)
Seth Carico (Cappadocian)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin
Donald Runnicles (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 2014, 30 August)

13:00 BBC Proms (p08l2p9c)
Stile Antico and Fretwork celebrate a Shakespearean anniversary
Sunday 16 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Today's concert, introduced by Petroc Trelawny, comes from 2016, when vocal ensemble Stile Antico and viol consort Fretwork combined to celebrate the 400th anniversary year of the death of England’s great bard, William Shakespeare. Their programme contrasts music by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with new settings from Nico Muhly and Composer in Association with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Huw Watkins. In the words of Shakespeare himself, ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music creep in our ears …’

Morley: It was a lover and his lass
Byrd: O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth
Byrd: Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?
Huw Watkins: The Phoenix and the Turtle
Byrd: Fantasia a 5, 'Two parts in one in the fourth above’
Tomkins: Be strong and of a good courage
Ramsey: Sleep, fleshly birth
Byrd: Browning a 5, 'The leaves be green’
Johnson: Full fathom five
Nico Muhly: Gentle sleep
Gibbons: In nomine No 1
Wilbye: Draw on, sweet night

Fretwork
Stile Antico

(From the BBC Proms, 15 August 2016)

18:15 Proms Preview (m000lv93)
A Week at the Proms - Programme 5
Sunday 16 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In the Fifth programme of this series Georgia Mann explores the coming week's Proms concerts with guests Katy Hamilton and Fiona Maddocks, as they react to archive performances, hear fresh interviews and select recommendations. Among the topics in discussion are a 1996 performance of Verdi’s opera, Don Carlos, with conductor Bernard Haitink and forces from the Royal Opera (Covent Garden) – of which he was Music Director at the time – and a cast including Olga Borodina and Dmitri Hvorostovsky; we reflect on the 2008 performance of Stockhausen’s Stimmung with Theatre of Voices and director Paul Hillier; and describe the magic that Colin Davis brought to the London Symphony Orchestra during its 2001 rendition of Beethoven’s "Pastoral" Symphony.

21:00 BBC Proms (p08kd6qm)
Paul McCreesh conducts Handel's Saul
Sunday 16 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts. The sole work in tonight's concert is one of Handel’s most dramatic and poignant biblical oratorios, Saul, performed complete by leading period-informed collective the Gabrieli Consort & Players, under Paul McCreesh. The cast is led by British bass Neal Davies as the mad king of Israel, with star German counter-tenor Andreas Scholl as his psalm-singing successor.

Davies, Scholl and McCreesh had recorded Saul with the Gabrieli Consort & Players in 2002, for a disc described by BBC Music Magazine as ‘overwhelming’. It was later made First Choice on BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library. Experience the work live in this exhilarating performance from the 2003 Proms season.

Presented by Martin Handley

Handel: Saul

Neal Davies (Saul)
Andreas Scholl (David)
Deborah York (Michal)
Susan Gritton (Merab)
Mark Padmore (Jonathan)
Paul Agnew (High Priest/Witch of Endor)
Jonathan Lemalu (Ghost of Samuel)
Gabrieli Consort & Players
Paul McCreesh (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 2003, 24 August)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000lsmy)
Summer Festivals
Monday 17 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore presents great BBC Prom concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs - today the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with music by Debussy, Dutilleux, Ravel and James MacMillan - the famous 1990 world premiere of his The Confession of Isobel Gowdie.

2.00pm
Debussy: Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune
Dutilleux: Tout un monde lointain, with Lynn Harrell (cello)
Ravel: Bolero
Ravel: Daphnis and Chloe (complete)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Donald Runnicles

3.45pm
James MacMillan: The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (world premiere)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Jerzy Maksymiuk

This week of Afternoon Concert features BBC Proms by six different BBC performing groups, starting with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra today. Tomorrow you can hear two concerts: the BBC Singers in A Patchwork Passion - a retelling of Passion story with music from five centuries of Biblical settings, including works by Schütz, J.S. Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, Arvo Pärt and James MacMillan; and then Günter Wand conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Bruckner's Eighth Symphony - the last of his legendary Proms with the orchestra, from 1995. On Wednesday Gianandrea Noseda conducts the BBC Philharmonic (and BBC Singers again) in Haydn and Schubert, in a Prom from 2006. In Thursday Opera Matinee, Jane Glover conducts a 2012 Prom semi-staging of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard. And on Friday, following a 2013 concert by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Thomas Sondergard, the BBC Concert Orchestra return to end the week on Friday with a 2003 Prom performance of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf narrated by David Attenborough .
.

19:30 BBC Proms (p08kd82m)
Mahler's Seventh Symphony with the BBC Philharmonic
Monday 17 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

After almost a decade at the helm of the BBC Philharmonic, Gianandrea Noseda (who later became the orchestra’s Conductor Laureate) opened this 2012 Prom with Mozart’s famous overture to Don Giovanni – by turns solemn, impetuous and edgy. From dreaming sleep to a dawn awakening, Oliver Knussen’s Second Symphony then takes us through a landscape of iridescent colour, with a vocal line that soars to stratospheric heights.

One of British music’s great originals, Knussen found an individual voice while still in his teens. This performance – given on his 60th-birthday year – is a celebration of his unique contribution to UK music. Its nocturnal sequence finds a counterpart in the two ‘Night Music’ movements of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony – his own all-encompassing journey from darkness to light – which concludes the programme.

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Mozart: Don Giovanni – overture
Knussen: Symphony No. 2
Mahler: Symphony No 7 in E minor

Gillian Keith (soprano)
BBC Philharmonic
Gianandrea Noseda (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 2012, 7 July)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000lw1r)
Summer Festivals
Tuesday 18 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore presents great BBC Prom concerts from recent years by BBC orchestras and choirs. The first of today's two concerts is a Prom from 2017 given by the BBC Singers, the City of London Sinfonia and soloists under the baton of Sofi Jeannin: it's called A Patchwork Passion, and brings together five centuries of Biblical settings, including works by Schütz, J. S. Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, Arvo Pärt and Sir James MacMillan.
Then, from 1995, the last of the legendary BBC Proms given by the German conductor Günter Wand with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

2.00pm
A Patchwork Passion - a retelling of the Passion story with music by various composers
Thomas Elwin,tenor
Christopher Bowen,tenor
David Shipley, bass
BBC Singers
City of London Sinfonia
Conductor Sofi Jeannin

3.30pm
Bruckner: Symphony No. 8
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Günter Wand

19:30 BBC Proms (p08kd8yy)
Carlo Maria Giulini conducts Brahms
Tuesday 18 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

BBC Proms: Brahms’s development in the time between composing his First and Second Symphonies was remarkable. Despite finishing it less than a year after the premiere of his First, the Second Symphony belongs to an entirely different world. It is an expansive, full-bodied work, infused with the idyllic surroundings of the Austrian spa town in which it was written.

In this concert from the 1994 Proms, Italian maestro Carlo Maria Giulini and the European Union Youth Orchestra pair the symphony with Brahms’s final effort in the medium: his thrilling Fourth. Written at the height of his musical powers (again, within a year of its predecessor), it is the first symphony by any composer to incorporate a strict set of variations into one of its movements: the finale is based on a repeating bass melody from Bach’s Cantata 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich’.

Presented by Ian Skelly

Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D major
Brahms: Symphony No. 4 in E minor

European Union Youth Orchestra
Carlo Maria Giulini (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 1994, 20 August)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000ls7w)
Summer Festivals
Wednesday 19 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore presents great BBC Prom concerts from recent years by BBC Orchestras and Choirs. Today's programme of music by Haydn and Schubert was given at the Royal Albert Hall on 30 July 2006.

Haydn: Mass in B flat major 'Heiligmesse'
Schubert: Symphony No 9 in C major, D 944
Lucy Crowe, soprano
Alexandra Sherman, mezzo-soprano
Alexander James Edwards, tenor
Matthew Rose, bass
BBC Singers
BBC Philharmonic
Conductor Gianandrea Noseda

19:30 BBC Proms (m000ls86)
A solo recital by star pianist Evgeny Kissin
Wednesday 19 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Martin Handley introduces this 1997 recital – the first-ever solo piano recital at the Proms – showcases the Russian phenomenon Evgeny Kissin in only his second Proms performance. At 26, his performances and recordings had already brought him the kind of attention reserved for the starriest virtuosos – such as Chopin and Liszt themselves, whose music he plays here alongside Haydn’s noble Sonata No 52.

Liszt’s fiendishly difficult Hungarian Rhapsody No 12 is the jewel in centre of this mammoth recital. With eight distinctive melodies, it is the most thematically rich of the 19 Rhapsodies – as well as one of the most popular. Closing the performance is the last of Chopin’s three piano sonatas.

Haydn: Sonata No 52 in E flat
Liszt: Liebesträum No 3 in A flat
Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No 12 in C sharp minor
Chopin: Nocturnes Ops 27 Nos 1 & 2
Chopin: Piano Sonata No 3 in B minor

Evgeny Kissin (piano)
(From the BBC Proms, 10 August 1997)

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000lv8b)
Summer Festivals
Thursday 20 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore presents great BBC Prom concerts by BBC Orchestras and Choirs: Jane Glover conducts the BBC Concert Orchestra & Singers in The Yeomen of the Guard by Gilbert & Sullivan - perhaps the most touching operetta they ever wrote - in this Prom from 2012.

Gilbert & Sullivan: The Yeomen of the Guard
Elsie Maynard ….. Lisa Milne, soprano
Jack Point ….. Mark Stone, baritone
Colonel Fairfax ….. Andrew Kennedy, tenor
Phoebe Meryll ….. Victoria Simmonds, mezzo-soprano
Wilfred Shadbolt ….. Toby Stafford-Allen, baritone
Leonard Meryll ….. Tom Randle, tenor
Lt Sir Richard Cholmondeley ….. Leigh Melrose, baritone
Dame Carruthers ….. Dame Felicity Palmer, mezzo-soprano
Kate, her niece ..... Mary Bevan, soprano
Sergeant Meryll ..... Mark Richardson, bass-baritone
BBC Singers
BBC Concert Orchestra
Conductor Jane Glover

19:30 BBC Proms (m000lv8j)
Colin Davis conducts Beethoven's 'Pastoral' Symphony
Thursday 20 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

BBC Proms: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is surely the apogee of the pastoral. Here it is prefaced by Sibelius’s late tone-poem, which he premiered in the USA, and Michael Tippett’s shimmering evocation of a Senegalese lakeside view. The last orchestral piece Tippett wrote, The Rose Lake was commissioned jointly by the London Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the composer’s 90th birthday.

As with Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, Tippett's piece is concerned with expressions of feeling rather than description. The late Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra give free reign to that feeling in this thrilling concert from the 2001 Proms.

Presented by Martin Handley

Sibelius: The Oceanides, Op. 73
Tippett: The Rose Lake
Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 in F major, ‘Pastoral’

London Symphony Orchestra
Colin Davis (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 2001, 13 September)

23:00 BBC Proms (p08kr2nm)
Late Escapes
Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices perform Stockhausen's Stimmung
Thursday 20 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

BBC Proms: Theatre of Voices and Paul Hillier had already released a magnificent recording of Stimmung a year before this Prom (one which lends ‘even more enchantment to this extraordinary work’, according to The Guardian). But this hypnotic piece for ‘six singers and six microphones’ takes on a unique atmosphere when performed live – as in this 2008 Prom.

Stockhausen: Stimmung (Copenhagen version)
Theatre of Voices
Paul Hillier (director)

Original performance from 2nd August 2008 presented by Louise Fryer.

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.

Among many influences that Stockhausen acknowledged when composing the work was a month spent wondering among Mexico ruins. The Theatre of Voices – as adept in music of the Middle Ages as in new music – have made something of a specialty of Stimmung, and Hillier’s long association with the piece includes his participation as one of the singers at a Prom performance 30 years ago.

14:00 Afternoon Concert - BBC Proms (m000lvr9)
Summer Festivals
Friday 21 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

Penny Gore presents great BBC Prom concerts by BBC Orchestras and Choirs: Russian music from the BBC NOW and the BBC Concert Orchestra with David Attenborough in Peter and the Wolf.

2.00pm
Colin Matthews: Turning Point (UK premiere)
Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No 2 in G minor, Op 63
Shostakovich: Symphony No 11 in G minor, Op 103 (The Year 1905)
Daniel Hope, violin
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Conductor Thomas Sondergard

3.45pm
Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf
David Attenborough, narrator
BBC Concert Orchestra
Conductor Barry Wordsworth

19:30 BBC Proms (p08kvd7h)
Music of the Spheres
Friday 21 August 2020, BBC Radio 3

BBC Proms: In this Prom from the 2010 season, Thomas Dausgaard conducts his Danish forces in Tchaikovsky’s ever-captivating Violin Concerto – written for the composer’s young muse, the violinist Josef Kotek – and Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, overwhelming in its nobly expansive final-movement ‘Swan Hymn’. Three short choral pieces by György Ligeti – including Lux aeterna, heard in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – take us to ethereal heights, while Ligeti himself recognised the mesmeric, free-floating character of Rued Langgard’s 1918 Music of the Spheres as prefiguring his own style. Henning Kraggerud is the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, and previous winner of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, Inger Dam-Jensen, sings in Langgaard’s kaleidoscopic masterpiece. Audiences at this landmark UK premiere left the hall with the sound of "heavenly" music, angel choirs and the sound of harps in their ears.

Presented by Kate Molleson.

Ligeti: Night; Morning (Proms premiere)
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D major
Ligeti: Lux aeterna
Langgaard: Music of the Spheres (UK premiere)
Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 in E flat major

Henning Kraggerud (violin)
Inger Dam-Jensen (soprano)
Danish Radio Vocal Ensemble and Concert Chorus
Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Dausgaard (conductor)

(From the BBC Proms 2010, 11 August)

In 2020, BBC Radio 3 is bringing together musical greats, from the past and the present, in one extraordinary Proms season. Radio 3 is broadcasting the best of four decades of unmissable Proms concerts.