BBC Proms 2021: Episode Guide & Ratings

Conductor Dalia Stasevska and the BBC Symphony Orchestra kick off a six-week season with Vaughan Williams’s ravishing Serenade to Music and Poulenc’s dazzling Organ Concerto. They’re joined by the BBC Singers and a cast of soloists, including soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn, tenor Allan Clayton and organist Daniel Hyde, for a celebration of the power of music to comfort and lift your spirits. Katie Derham presents from the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Katie Derham presents from the Royal Albert Hall, as the opening concert of the 2021 Proms season continues in front of a live audience. Conductor Dalia Stasevska and the BBC Symphony Orchestra perform Sibelius’s thrilling Second Symphony. They are joined by soloists including soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and tenor Allan Clayton for the world premiere of When Soft Voices Die, a poignant piece for our times by Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra and their young Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev showcase Mozart’s final three symphonies – composed over a period of just two months in the summer of 1788.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla champion the music of a too-long neglected composer. A pupil of Vaughan Williams, Ruth Gipps started her career as an oboist with what was then the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1944, before becoming established as a composer. Her Symphony No. 2 takes a wide-screen, cinematic view of the Second World War, embracing exhilaration, anxiety and, finally, ecstatic rejoicing. Conflict of a very different kind runs through The Exterminating Angel Symphony by Thomas Adès (50 this year), inspired by Louis Buñuel’s Surrealist film. Brahms’s Third Symphony strikes a more autumnal tone, inspired by a visit to the River Rhine in 1883. The critic Eduard Hanslick pronounced it ‘artistically the most nearly perfect’ of the composer’s symphonies to date.

Musical borrowings, reworkings and reinventions run through this season’s Proms. The invisible thread linking tonight’s concert really begins with Bach. A lilting chaconne from his Cantata No. 150 underpins the finale of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, and the latter’s elegant synthesis of heart and head is itself the inspiration for American composer Elizabeth Ogonek’s Cloudline, a lyrical homage to ancient musical forms and techniques. The chaconne’s repeating patterns are echoed elsewhere in the circling bass line of Purcell’s powerful Lament from Dido and Aeneas. Cellist Guy Johnston is the soloist in anniversary-composer Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No .1.

Smell the greasepaint and feel the blaze of those Broadway lights, as the BBC Concert Orchestra whisks you away for a night at the musicals. The toe-tapping favourites include songs from musicals including South Pacific, My Fair Lady, Anything Goes, Annie Get Your Gun and High Society, all performed by the ever-versatile BBC Concert Orchestra – and some special guest soloists.

Rising star Jonathon Heyward conducts the talented teenagers of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain in one of the all-time symphonic greats. Propelling the symphony into the Romantic age, Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ is a celebration of scope and drama, a musical depiction of heroism that surges with pioneering spirit. Nicola Benedetti is the soloist in Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with its song-like slow movement – a work whose sardonic wit is balanced by a new lyricism that would come to dominate the composer’s later works. The Prom also includes a new NYOGB commission by British composer, jazz trumpeter and former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, Laura Jurd.

Nicholas Collon and the Aurora Orchestra’s from-memory performances have become a thrilling recent fixture of the Proms. Now, following symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich and Berlioz, they tackle their most audacious challenge yet: a complete performance of the colourful 1945 suite from Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird. Russian fairy tales and folk melodies collide with Stravinsky’s bold musical modernism to create a memorable score. Radio 3 presenter Tom Service introduces the work from the stage, exploring its textures and themes and dismantling its intricate musical narrative with the help of Collon and his musicians. The concert opens with another Russian classic: Rachmaninov’s virtuosic Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, with former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Pavel Kolesnikov as soloist.

Award-winning Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson makes his much-anticipated Proms debut, as soloist in both Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in F minor, whose energised outer movements frame a ravishing central Adagio, and Mozart’s pioneering Piano Concerto K491, a rare minor-key work whose stormy, richly orchestrated music climaxes in a relentless dance. The Philharmonia Orchestra and its dynamic Finnish Principal Conductor Designate Santtu-Matias Rouvali frame the concert with two symphonies: Prokofiev’s playful ‘Classical’ Symphony, with its clever juxtaposition of traditional forms and contemporary colours, and the more loaded irony of Shostakovich’s compact Symphony No. 9.

A host of British opera stars join Ben Glassberg and the BBC Philharmonic for a night rich in emotion and drama. After a year of lockdowns and social distancing, the themes of isolation and loneliness as well as the joy of reunion have particular poignancy in excerpts from much-loved operas including Handel’s Rodelinda, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel and Puccini’s La bohème.

British saxophonist, composer, DJ and bandleader Nubya Garcia is one of the brightest of a new generation of jazz talent, drawing comparison with greats such as Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon. Named a ‘major voice’ by The New York Times, she has devised a brand of ‘eclectic, danceable, political jazz’ that draws on influences from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Tonight marks her Proms debut.

The London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle mark 2021’s Stravinsky anniversary with a series of symphonic snapshots. We follow Stravinsky’s view of the symphony from the experimental, colour-blocked ‘ritual’ of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, through the transitional Symphony in C – reflecting both the composer’s European past and his American future – to arrive at the bold Symphony in Three Movements.

The Chineke! Orchestra returns for its fourth visit to the Proms, celebrating diversity in composers as well as performers. Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s overture to his popular cantata based on the tale of a Native American leader quotes the spiritual ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’. There are further meetings of African and European musical styles in Nigerian composer Fela Sowande’s African Suite and the piano concerto by Florence Price, the first female African-American composer to win renown in America. By contrast, Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphony, written as a 20-year old student of Stanford at London’s Royal College of Music, reveals the influence of his hero, Dvořák.

From an icy Italian winter to the heady, sensual warmth of a South American summer: violinist Joshua Bell leads the Academy of St Martin in the Fields on a musical journey through the sights and sounds of two continents and four very different seasons. Inspired by Vivaldi’s best-known work, Piazzolla – Argentina’s 20th-century tango king, whose 100th anniversary we celebrate this year – created his own response, complete with musical quotations. While Vivaldi’s virtuosic concertos celebrate contrast – the freshness of spring, with its sudden thunderstorms, versus the languid heat of summer – Piazzolla’s musical landscape remains more constant, always swaying to the pervasive rhythm of the tango.

Author Michael Morpurgo joins the seven talented Kanneh-Mason siblings and starry musical friends for this special Family Prom. Saint-Saëns’s much-loved suite The Carnival of the Animals – a musical menagerie packed with braying donkeys, energetic kangaroos, a serene swan and an aquarium of glinting fish – gets a fresh update in witty new poems by Morpurgo.

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov pair Beethoven’s dramatic concert aria ‘Ah! perfido’ with the Second Symphony – a work whose vitality and ‘smiling’ mood belie the private struggles and despair of a composer wrestling with hearing loss – with a new commission from celebrated American composer George Lewis. This world premiere blends a conventional orchestra with spatialised electronics, exploiting the unique space of the Royal Albert Hall to create, in Lewis’s words, ‘a medium for meditation on what processes of decolonisation might sound like’.

Blending soul, jazz, art-pop and spoken word, singer-songwriter Moses Sumney defies traditional categories. His ever-evolving voice has channelled political rage and emotional optimism into everything from sprawling orchestral tracks to electronica. Here he performs songs from his albums Aromanticism and græ in new orchestral arrangements, masterminded by Jules Buckley.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner makes his 60th Proms appearance directing his own Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in Handel’s vividly theatrical Dixit Dominus – a concerto for choir that blazes with virtuosity and colour. It’s paired with Bach’s Easter cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden – a fiery, dramatic setting of Luther’s popular hymn. Mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg is the soloist in the young Handel’s cantata of praise to the Virgin Mary, Donna, che in ciel, containing music the composer later borrowed for his opera Agrippina.

The Sinfonia of London makes its much-anticipated official concert debut under John Wilson, who re-established the ensemble in 2018. Following on from their award-winning recording, this orchestral ‘army of generals’ brings with it Korngold’s stirring, filmic Symphony in F sharp. It’s part of a musical bird’s-eye view of 19th- and 20th-century Vienna that also includes the overture to Die Fledermaus and Ravel’s dizzying La valse.

Bach’s crowning masterpiece, the St Matthew Passion combines moments of extraordinary fragility and tenderness with raw choral power and explosive jubilation, bitter grief with passages of consolation. With double chorus and orchestra, its scope and ambition is vast – a piece made for the Royal Albert Hall. Following on from their gripping account of Handel’s Theodora in 2018, period-instrument ensemble Arcangelo and Director Jonathan Cohen return to the Proms, joined by a glittering line-up of soloists including Roderick Williams and rising star Stuart Jackson.

With his ‘thrilling vocal heroics’ and ‘magnetic stage presence’, Stuart Skelton is one of the great tenors of his generation, a regular in all the major international opera houses. The Australian singer is joined by charismatic Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova for the climax of the 2021 festival – a musical celebration like no other.