BBC Proms 2014: Episode Guide & Ratings

The greatest classical music festival in the world gets underway from the Royal Albert Hall. Katie Derham introduces a performance of Elgar's sublime biblical oratorio, The Kingdom, a powerful musical portrayal of the acts of the disciples after the ascension of Jesus. Sir Andrew Davis returns to the Proms in his 70th birthday year to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the BBC National Chorus of Wales. They are joined by soloists Erin Wall as the Blessed Virgin, Catherine Wyn-Rogers as Mary Magdalene, Andrew Staples as St John and Christopher Purves as St Peter.

Following the excitement of the First Night, presenters Petroc Trelawny and world-renowned soprano Danielle de Niese kick off the regular Friday night slot with Beethoven's much-loved 6th Symphony. This lyrical paean to the renewing powers of nature is conducted by David Zinman in his final appearance as chief conductor of Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, in a concert that also includes Richard Strauss's sparkling tone-poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche and Dvorak's Violin Concerto in A minor. This Romantic masterpiece is performed by its champion, German violinist Julia Fischer, who says it has 'the greatest beginning of any violin concerto'.

History in the making at the opening concert in a series of Sunday nights at the BBC Proms with the first ever visit from the China Philharmonic Orchestra. Founded in 2000, the orchestra has made its mark in a country where the appetite for classical music keeps growing and growing. Star soloist Alison Balsom joins the orchestra and conductor Long Yu for a new trumpet concerto by Chinese composer Qigang Chen, alongside music by Elgar and Tchaikovsky. There is also a spectacular piano concerto by Liszt performed by rising young virtuoso Haochen Zhang, all culminating in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Presented by Katie Derham.

Tom Service presents as Russian maestro Valery Gergiev brings the World Orchestra for Peace to the Proms for a performance of Mahler's all-encompassing Sixth Symphony. In celebration of Richard Strauss's 150th birthday year, Gergiev also conducts the symphonic fantasia Die Frau ohne Schatten.

Samira Ahmed and pianist Nicholas McCarthy present a concert of contrasts, with Mozart's intimate and elegant Piano Concerto no 23 paired with Ravel's sumptuously orchestrated ballet Daphnis and Chloe, originally commissioned by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The soloist is Argentinian Ingrid Fliter and the BBC Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Spaniard Josep Pons.

From the Royal Albert Hall, Katie Derham presents a 150th anniversary celebration of the birth of Richard Strauss. The acclaimed Danish soprano Inger Dam-Jensen sings the composer's exquisite Four Last Songs in a prom which also showcases two of Strauss's rarely heard works - his majestic Festival Prelude and his Deutsche Motette for choir and four solo voices. The mood of late-romantic nostalgia continues with a performance of Elgar's Second Symphony. Vasily Petrenko conducts the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the BBC Singers.

Tom Service invites us to listen to well-known, definitive masterworks from two of the greatest composers of all time with a fresh ear. Donald Runnicles takes on Beethoven's Fourth Symphony with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and joins forces with the National Youth Choir of Scotland and four top British soloists for Mozart's Requiem - a work of tragic beauty both musically and historically, left unfinished by Mozart just before his death in 1791. Soloists are the soprano Carolyn Sampson, mezzo-soprano Christine Rice, tenor Jeremy Ovenden and bass Neal Davies.

In his proms concerto debut, French pianist Alexandre Tharaud performs one of Ravel's last great works, the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. Conductor Juanjo Mena also leads the BBC Philharmonic in a Mahler masterpiece, the Fifth Symphony, which includes one of greatest love letters ever written - the famous Adagietto. Presented by Suzy Klein and Nicholas McCarthy.

Sir John Tavener, who died in 2013, was one of the country's defining musical voices. His sacred choral music, inspired by his deep Orthodox faith, touches the hearts of millions and has been the soundtrack to some of this nation's most moving events. Just before he died he completed his Requiem Fragments, commissioned by the BBC for this Prom. The Tallis Scholars are conducted by Sir John's great friend Peter Phillips, who describes the work as a miraculous masterpiece. The concert begins with his radiant choral work Ikon of Light. Presented by Katie Derham.

Tom Service presents as Russian maestro Valery Gergiev brings the World Orchestra for Peace to the Proms for a performance of Mahler's all-encompassing Sixth Symphony. In celebration of Richard Strauss's 150th birthday year, Gergiev also conducts the symphonic fantasia Die Frau ohne Schatten.

The work that changed the course of music forever, Beethoven's epic Eroica Symphony is the culmination of this concert from Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé. Berlioz's swashbuckling overture Le corsaire, depicting the adventures of pirates on the ocean wave, opens the concert with a splash. Elder is famed for his Elgar and he is joined by British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote for the Sea Pictures, Elgar's orchestral song-cycle exploring the fascination and fear inspired by the sea. Presented by Suzy Klein and Rodney Earl Clarke.

Jazz singer and broadcaster Clare Teal transports us back to the heady days of the swing band era of the 1930s and 1940s in a recreation of the bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington. Conductor James Pearson of the Count Pearson Proms Band takes on Grant Windsor of the Duke Windsor Proms band in a roof-raising battle, with help from vocalists Gregory Porter and Vula Malinga. The evening culminates in a bespoke rousing 'battle royal' for the biggest audience ovation. Presented by Katie Derham

Tom Service reaches the 20th century on his route through Masterworks at the Proms, by way of Jean Sibelius and William Walton. Canadian violinist James Ehnes performs Walton's striking violin concerto, and Thomas Sondergard conducts the National Orchestra of Wales in two works by Sibelius - the transcendent tone poem The Swan of Tuonela, and his Fifth Symphony with its memorable, ecstatic 'swan theme'.

Razia Iqbal and Petroc Trelawny present a special concert drawing together four composers whose lives and music were impacted by WW1. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Manze performs Vaughan Williams's post-war composition, the elegiac Pastoral Symphony. The three promising young composers also featured in the concert were all killed in the war and have left us poignant evocations of lost lands and innocence destroyed - George Butterworth's settings of poems from AE Housman's nostalgic collection A Shropshire Lad; Australian-born Frederick Septimus Kelly's Elegy for his friend Rupert Brooke; and, from across the battle lines, German composer Rudi Stephan's Music for Orchestra.

English weekend at the Proms continues with Elgar's autumnal, sepia-toned Cello Concerto, written after the horrors of the First World War. Norwegian virtuoso cellist Truls Mørk joins the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, visiting the Proms from Australia for the first time and conducted by a Proms favourite, Sir Andrew Davis. The concert opens with Richard Strauss's spectacular tone poem about the serial womaniser Don Juan, with romantic unrequited love at the heart of the final piece, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Presented by Katie Derham.

Join CBeebies at the Royal Albert Hall for the first ever CBeebies Prom. The BBC Philharmonic, with some of your CBeebies favourites, take you on a musical journey to discover lots of different and exciting sounds. Salty Dog is the first animal to appear in a Prom concert, alongside her friend Jack, Bernard Cribbins, while Robert the Robot is out and about around London finding the perfect sound to finish the concert. Enjoy energetic orchestral pieces and CBeebies themes with Andy, Cat, Chris, Gem, Katy and Mr Bloom.

Tom Service presents as the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain return for their annual Proms performance. Ed Gardner conducts an energetic programme of 20th-century music featuring Stravinsky's vivid ballet Petrushka, Lutoslawski's colourful Concerto for Orchestra and Prokofiev's First Piano Concerto with soloist Louis Schwizgebel.

A Proms visit from Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is always an exciting event. The international ensemble's home is Seville and the programme has a strong Spanish flavour. Razia Iqbal and organist-conductor Wayne Marshall present Mozart's sparkling overture to the Marriage of Figaro - set just outside Seville - and a series of Ravel pieces including Rapsodie espagnol, Pavane for a Dead Princess and the ultra-popular Bolero.

The Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra make their debut at the festival. Music inspired by the east colours the programme, with the sounds and scents of bazaars and seraglios, as well as portraits of the Queen of Sheba by both Handel and Respighi. Also, violin virtuoso Daniel Hope premieres a new concerto by the remarkable young composer Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of the great Sergei Prokofiev. Presented by Katie Derham.

Live from the Royal Albert Hall, Tom Service presents music from multi-award-winning American composer John Adams, alongside Mahler's imaginatively ambitious 1st Symphony. Saxophonist Timothy McAllister performs the UK premiere of Adams's Saxophone Concerto and Marin Alsop conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Samira Ahmed presents a concert celebrating 50 years of the world-famous Monteverdi Choir, founded by conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner. This Prom of Beethoven's mighty Missa Solemnis also features the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique with a line-up of star soloists. The performance is introduced by a short film exploring the Monteverdi Choir's impact on the music scene over 50 groundbreaking years.

The Royal Albert Hall shimmers with flamboyance as Paloma Faith takes to the stage in her debut Proms performance. The multi-platinum London-born singer-songwriter is reunited with conductor, composer, trumpeter and arranger Guy Barker, a 42-piece jazz orchestra and the elite Urban Voices Collective for a one-off concert featuring new arrangements of songs including Picking up the Pieces, Can't Rely on You, Only Love Can Hurt Like This and Upside Down.

Katie Derham is live at the world's biggest classical music festival as the legendary Cleveland Orchestra perform at the BBC Proms. This is a rare chance to hear one of America's best orchestras in a huge Proms favourite, Brahms's First Symphony. The concert opens with Brahms in a lighter mood in his Academic Festival Overture and also includes the UK premiere of an elegant, dance-like flute concerto by German clarinettist and composer Jorg Widmann.

A celebration of the 80th birthdays of two of the country's greatest living composers, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sir Harrison Birtwistle, whose works changed forever the landscape of British music. Tom Service presents a selection of their music from the 2014 Proms, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies as his guest at the Royal Albert Hall.

Daniel Hope and Danielle De Niese present a pair of great Romantic blockbusters - Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, featuring soloist Denis Matsuev. The Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra makes its first visit to the BBC Proms, conducted by its music director Han-Na Chang.

Live from the Royal Albert Hall, Katie Derham introduces the final concert of the 2014 Proms season. The programme includes William Walton's Popular Song from Façade and Malcolm Arnold's overture Peterloo, receiving its first performance in a new choral version with lyrics by Sir Tim Rice. There is a tribute to the late Sir John Tavener with his iconic Song for Athene and the Strauss anniversary celebrations conclude with a performance of the composer's massive work Taillefer, with soloists Elizabeth Watts, John Daszak and Roderick Williams. Celebrated Dutch violinist Janine Jansen plays Chausson's evocative Poème and the concert begins with the world premiere of Velocity by young British composer Gavin Higgins. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the BBC Singers are conducted by Sakari Oramo, conducting the Last Night of the Proms for the first time.

Live from the Royal Albert Hall, Katie Derham introduces the grand finale to the 2014 Proms. Violinist Janine Jansen and baritone Roderick Williams join the combined forces of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Chorus on stage under the baton of Sakari Oramo, who conducts the Last Night of the Proms for the first time. Around the UK, Proms in the Park audiences in Glasgow, Swansea, Belfast and London join in the singing of favourites from Walt Disney's classic film Mary Poppins to celebrate its 50th anniversary, before the traditional climax of Rule Britannia, Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem.

John Wilson and his orchestra are joined by a spectacular ensemble of singers and dancers from Broadway and the West End for a unique performance of the classic musical Kiss Me, Kate. Hits including Another Op'nin, Another Show, Wunderbar and Too Darn Hot combine to create a dazzling evening of music, dance and theatre to mark 50 years since the death of its celebrated composer and lyricist Cole Porter. This hilarious take on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew is performed in its glorious 1948 original orchestration, a highlight of the 2014 BBC Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall. Starring Ben Davis, Alexandra Silber, Tony Yazbeck and Louise Dearman.

A major new musical adaptation of the international hit War Horse, created by the National Theatre for the BBC Proms. Simon Russell Beale presents the unique production at the Royal Albert Hall with Gareth Malone's Proms Military Wives Choir, the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Cambiata Choir North West, alongside the National Theatre Ensemble with the astonishing Handspring Puppets. There's even a role for writer Michael Morpurgo as himself.

The work that changed the course of music forever, Beethoven's epic Eroica Symphony is the culmination of this concert from Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé. Berlioz's swashbuckling overture Le corsaire, depicting the adventures of pirates on the ocean wave, opens the concert with a splash. Elder is famed for his Elgar and he is joined by British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote for the Sea Pictures, Elgar's orchestral song-cycle exploring the fascination and fear inspired by the sea. Presented by Suzy Klein and Rodney Earl Clarke.

Three masterworks from three different centuries: Beethoven’s First Symphony is all 18th- century poise and wit, Bruch’s First Violin Concerto swoons with 19th-century romance, and Walton’s Henry V celebrates the golden age of 20th-century film music. Sir Neville Marriner is joined by Joshua Bell, the Music Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, who appears here both as conductor (Beethoven) and soloist (Bruch).

Tom Service presents as the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain return for their annual Proms performance. Ed Gardner conducts an energetic programme of 20th-century music featuring Stravinsky's vivid ballet Petrushka, Lutoslawski's colourful Concerto for Orchestra and Prokofiev's First Piano Concerto with soloist Louis Schwizgebel.

In the first of two concerts with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Principal Conductor Thomas Søndergård directs the first of two great Scandinavian symphonies. Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony explores a bleakness that is also at the core of Strauss’s great tone-poem Tod und Verklärung. The ‘complicated nonsense’ of Strauss’s youthful Burleske and Mozart’s sunny Rondo in A major complete the concert, both featuring pianist Franceso Piemontesi.

Tom Service reaches the 20th century on his route through Masterworks at the Proms, by way of Jean Sibelius and William Walton. Canadian violinist James Ehnes performs Walton's striking violin concerto, and Thomas Sondergard conducts the National Orchestra of Wales in two works by Sibelius - the transcendent tone poem The Swan of Tuonela, and his Fifth Symphony with its memorable, ecstatic 'swan theme'.

The dreamy pastoralism of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending contrasts with the jaunty vigour of the composer’s overture The Wasps in this all-English Prom. Job continues this season’s thread of great 20th-century ballet scores, while William Alwyn’s First Symphony adds to the evening’s nostalgia with the endless melody of its slow movement. Janine Jansen joins Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra as soloist.

Surrender to the pulsing rhythms and repetitions of Minimalism’s founding father, Steve Reich, performed by the BBC Singers and contemporary specialists the Endymion Ensemble. Relive the early experimentation of It’s Gonna Rain with its hypnotic layers of spoken sound, while The Desert Music offers a hypnotising meditation on fragments of William Carlos Williams’s poetry.

Sibelius’s slowly shifting structures and emotive musical language, showcased here in his Second Symphony, are echoed and evolved in Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Fifth Symphony. John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic also mark the First World Way centenary in Bridge’s haunting Oration – part lament, part warning.

Rameau’s opera Les Indes galantes and Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben were notorious flops at their premieres, yet both are now recognised as peaks of their genre. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra take us from 18th-century France to fin-de-siècle Germany (with a quick stop-off in Chelsea, where the 8-year-old Mozart composed his First Symphony) in a concert that also includes the UK premiere of Bernard Rands’s Piano Concerto.

Coloured by sleigh-bells and charming melodies, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is the centrepiece of this Prom by Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra. They pair Mahler’s mighty work with the Classical perfection of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony.

The Aurora Orchestra and Nicholas Collon contrast Mozart’s graceful Symphony with two much newer pieces: Dobrinka Tabakova’s hurdy-gurdy-inflected Spinning a Yarn and Benedict Mason’s audacious BBC commission, Meld.

Razia Iqbal and Petroc Trelawny present a special concert drawing together four composers whose lives and music were impacted by WW1. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Manze performs Vaughan Williams's post-war composition, the elegiac Pastoral Symphony. The three promising young composers also featured in the concert were all killed in the war and have left us poignant evocations of lost lands and innocence destroyed - George Butterworth's settings of poems from AE Housman's nostalgic collection A Shropshire Lad; Australian-born Frederick Septimus Kelly's Elegy for his friend Rupert Brooke; and, from across the battle lines, German composer Rudi Stephan's Music for Orchestra.

An all-Russian programme from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Edward Gardner opens with the buzzing energy of Stravinsky’s Scherzo fantastique and end in the cannon-fire of Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812’ Overture. In between come Rachmaninov’s choral symphony The Bells and Stravinsky’s iconoclastic violin concerto, performed here by soloist Baiba Skride.

English weekend at the Proms continues with Elgar's autumnal, sepia-toned Cello Concerto, written after the horrors of the First World War. Norwegian virtuoso cellist Truls Mørk joins the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, visiting the Proms from Australia for the first time and conducted by a Proms favourite, Sir Andrew Davis. The concert opens with Richard Strauss's spectacular tone poem about the serial womaniser Don Juan, with romantic unrequited love at the heart of the final piece, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Presented by Katie Derham.

Brit Award- and Mercury-nominated singer-songwriter Laura Mvula returns to the BBC Proms for an intimate Late Night Prom – a cabaret-style evening of music that couches Mvula’s talents in rich orchestral textures.

A Proms visit from Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is always an exciting event. The international ensemble's home is Seville and the programme has a strong Spanish flavour. Razia Iqbal and organist-conductor Wayne Marshall present Mozart's sparkling overture to the Marriage of Figaro - set just outside Seville - and a series of Ravel pieces including Rapsodie espagnol, Pavane for a Dead Princess and the ultra-popular Bolero.

Wilfred Owen’s shattering verse sits at the heart of Britten’s War Requiem – that great pacifist outpouring of horror and sorrow. Performed here in this First World War centenary year by the same orchestra which premiered it in 1962, in this performance the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Andris Nelsons are joined by the BBC Proms Youth Choir.

The Iceland Symphony Orchestra makes its Proms debut with works by two homegrown composers, both inspired by Iceland’s geology. The slow-growing, primal force of Leifs’s Geysir is balanced by the shifting tectonics of Tómasson’s Magma. Jonathan Biss joins the orchestra for Schumann’s Piano Concerto, and the concert closes with Beethoven’s dramatic Fifth Symphony.

Ice-maidens, pirates and princesses form the cast of this fairy-tale concert. The BBC Symphony Orchestra is joined by soprano Anu Komsi to perform Szymanowski’s atmospheric Songs of a Fairy Princess. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade sees the orchestra turn storyteller.

Cellist Alisa Weilerstein returns to the Proms with one of the great Romantic concertos – Dvořák’s Cello Concerto. Jiří Bělohlávek leads the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in Beethoven’s ‘apotheosis of the dance’, the Seventh Symphony; and the evening opens with a Czech flavour, in the overture to Janáček’s final opera, From the House of the Dead.

This year’s Free Prom is a Bank Holiday matinee from the Ulster Orchestra, bursting with dance rhythms and colour. A selection of Dvořák’s rustic Slavonic Dances opens the concert, and Grieg’s piano concerto with its jaunty dance-themed finale continues the mood. The evening ends in the orchestra’s musical heartland with Bax’s tone-poem Roscatha and Bill Whelan’s new Riverdance suite – adapted from his music for the ever-popular stage show.

The Bank Holiday weekend celebrations continue with Proms favourites the Budapest Festival Orchestra and a programme of orchestral showpieces from the Habsburg Empire. Viennese-style Strauss dances are matched by Brahms’s colourful Hungarian Dances and Kodály’s sweeping Dances of Galánta, balanced by the crisp Classical textures of a Mozart March. At the centre is Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony.

The second of two concerts from Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra reinstates the Proms tradition of composer nights with an evening dedicated to the music of Brahms. His intimate, autumnal Third Symphony gives way to the nobility and stature of the Fourth – a heavyweight symphony with one of the loveliest slow movements the composer ever wrote.

Samira Ahmed presents a concert celebrating 50 years of the world-famous Monteverdi Choir, founded by conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner. This Prom of Beethoven's mighty Missa Solemnis also features the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique with a line-up of star soloists. The performance is introduced by a short film exploring the Monteverdi Choir's impact on the music scene over 50 groundbreaking years.

Myung-Whun Chung directs the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, making its Proms debut this year. Unsuk Chin’s sheng concerto evokes the sounds of South Korea and is an extended sonic game between soloist and orchestra. Framing this is the sensuous richness of Debussy’s La mer and Tchaikovsky’s final symphony, with its elusive and emotional narrative.

Masterpieces from Schoenberg, Holst and Scriabin offer three very different portraits of 20th-century music in this concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski. Big tunes and vivid characterisation make Holst’s The Planets a perennial favourite, while Scriabin’s Prometheus is an eccentric musical experiment. Premiered at the Proms in 1912, Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces took tonality to a new limit.

In a symphony that took over six years to complete, Mahler wrestles with the essential questions of humanity. Birth, death and the fragile stages between are the subject of this grand musical exploration, which culminates in a transcendent choral finale. Daniel Harding and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra are joined by soloists Kate Royal and Chistianne Stotijn.

In Richard Strauss’s 150th-anniversary year the Proms presents a double bill of his two great tragedies. On consecutive nights his heroines Salome and Elektra meet their bloody ends in the Royal Albert Hall. Donald Runnicles brings his Deutsche Oper forces to the Proms for Salome. Star soprano Nina Stemme leads the cast as the troubled princess.

Elektra – Strauss’s brutal and ferociously powerful retelling of the Greek revenge myth – continues this weekend’s opera double bill. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Semyon Bychkov are joined by an international cast of soloists, led by American soprano Christine Goerke, with Danish baritone Johan Reuter as her beloved brother Orestes.

Plunge into a joyous carnival maelstrom with Berlioz’s giddy Roman Carnival overture. The Italian theme continues with Respighi’s Roman trilogy – a vivid picture of life in the Eternal City. Danny Driver joins the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Charles Dutoit in Walton’s Sinfonia concertante – a piano concerto in all but name.

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra makes its Proms debut, bringing Pulitzer Prize-winning Chinese composer Zhou Long’s piano concerto Postures – a work fusing Western forms and Eastern memories. The concert opens with the overture to Glinka’s fairy-tale opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, and closes with Rachmaninov’s ever-popular Second Symphony.

Symphonies from Beethoven and Dvořák bookend an emotive programme from Sir Roger Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. At its core is the wistful 'Romeo Alone’ section of Berlioz’s ‘dramatic symphony’ Romeo and Juliet. Beethoven’s ‘little symphony in F’ brings joy and wit to the mix, while Dvořák’s ‘New World’ Symphony is an elegiac homage to his Bohemian homeland.

Live from the Royal Albert Hall, Tom Service presents music from multi-award-winning American composer John Adams, alongside Mahler's imaginatively ambitious 1st Symphony. Saxophonist Timothy McAllister performs the UK premiere of Adams's Saxophone Concerto and Marin Alsop conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Last at the Proms in 2012, Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker return for an all-Russian programme inspired by dance. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances embraces jazz, plainchant and the waltz in a virtuosic orchestral showpiece. After the interval we enter the Russian fairy-tale world of Stravinsky’s magical The Firebird, in this vivid, folk-infused ballet score.

The Royal Albert Hall shimmers with flamboyance as Paloma Faith takes to the stage in her debut Proms performance. The multi-platinum London-born singer-songwriter is reunited with conductor, composer, trumpeter and arranger Guy Barker, a 42-piece jazz orchestra and the elite Urban Voices Collective for a one-off concert featuring new arrangements of songs, including Picking up the Pieces, Can't Rely on You, Only Love Can Hurt Like This and Upside Down.

Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker present Peter Sellars’s staging of Bach’s St Matthew Passion for the first time in the UK. It’s a work that confronts suffering and torture as well as salvation and redemption in some of Bach’s most moving music. Mark Padmore’s Evangelist leads a starry cast that also includes celebrated German baritone Christian Gerhaher.

Daniel Hope and Danielle De Niese present a pair of great Romantic blockbusters - Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, featuring soloist Denis Matsuev. The Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra makes its first visit to the BBC Proms, conducted by its music director Han-Na Chang.

Katie Derham is live at the world's biggest classical music festival as the legendary Cleveland Orchestra perform at the BBC Proms. This is a rare chance to hear one of America's best orchestras in a huge Proms favourite, Brahms's First Symphony. The concert opens with Brahms in a lighter mood in his Academic Festival Overture and also includes the UK premiere of an elegant, dance-like flute concerto by German clarinettist and composer Jorg Widmann.

Completing this year’s cycle of Brahms symphonies, the Cleveland Orchestra returns with the composer’s Symphony No. 2 – an open-hearted score of great warmth and appeal. By contrast, Brahms’s Tragic Overture lives up to its name with turbulent intensity. The concert is completed by Jörg Widmann’s Teufel Amor, a musical account of the contradictions, tensions and resolutions of love.

On Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s 80th birthday, the Proms pays tribute in a concert of works selected by the composer himself. The concert overture Ebb of Winter captures the rugged beauty of Davies’s Orkney home. We see a different side of island life in the joyous ebullience of his Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise; the virtuosic fourth Strathclyde Concerto, for clarinet and orchestra, completes the concert.

It’s American Night at the Proms. We travel through history, from traditional folk songs and dances in Copland’s Appalachian Spring, through the contemplative Quiet City to Chris Brubeck’s contemporary blend of classical, jazz, blues and country music. His Travels in Time for Three is a thrill-ride concerto composed for virtuoso string trio Time for Three and orchestra.

An evening of 20th-century English music that looks beyond pastoral stereotypes. The nostalgic idyll of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’ is soon abandoned for the brutality of his Symphony No. 4 and Birtwistle’s Exody – a terrifying musical labyrinth. Walton’s much-loved Viola Concerto is played here by rising star and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Lise Berthaud.

Mahler’s epic, unorthodox Third Symphony unfolds over six movements, painting a musical portrait with choir and orchestra of nature’s very essence. American conductor Alan Gilbert returns to conduct this masterpiece with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Joined by the instrumentalists of the Britten Sinfonia, Canadian-American, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright performs a spectacular set, taking over the Royal Albert Hall with his own brand of ‘Baroque pop’ that references everything from opera to ragtime, Lieder and jazz.

A highlight of every Proms season, this year Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 returns to its traditional slot on the penultimate night. Alan Gilbert and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra are joined by an international cast of soloists for this audacious musical testament to faith and unity across all nations and creeds.