BBC Proms 2022: the 10 best concerts
London premieres, much-loved classics and a host of big-name performers in the world's largest music festival. Booking opens 9AM, Sat 21 May
Prom 1: First Night of the Proms 2022
The spectacular opening concert of the BBC Proms 2022 marks the returns to the Royal Allbert Hall of full-scale forces. Tenor of the moment Freddie De Tommaso (pictured) is joined by soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha and others when Sakari Oramo conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra and choirs in Verdi's operatic Requiem. Soaring arias, heartfelt choruses and dramatic orchestration travel from loss to eternal light in this powerful piece.
Read more ...Proms 11 & 12: CBeebies Prom/A Journey into the Ocean
All aboard for an underwater musical adventure with CBeebies stars and the Southbank Sinfonia conducted by Kwame Ryan (pictured). The two relaxed performances last one hour, and include musical extracts that conjure up marine life, with precious creatures and a unique sound world. Broadcast live on Radio 3 and recorded for later transmission on CBeebies.
Read more ...Prom 22: Beethoven's Fifth from Memory
For 10 years Aurora Orchestra has been thrilling Proms audiences with performances from memory of classic works. This summer it is Beethoven's Symphony No 5, with its distinctive di-di-di dah opening. But if you think you known this music, wait until the BBC's Tom Service and conductor Nicholas Collon take it apart and put it back together again in this highly entertaining programme. Also played, the Violin Concerto No 1 by rebellious Russian Dmitri Shostakovich, with exciting soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja (pictured), and to open, the mathematical O-Mega, final composition of Iannis Xenakis, who was born 100 years ago.
Read more ...Prom 25: Concerto for Theremin
'Cinderella' instruments – the ones who do not get many showy outings – attract the limelight this season. Among them, the mysterious theremin, as developed a century ago by a cellist and physicist Lev Termen, which makes music without direct contact with the player... Tonight, Carolina Eyck (pictured) draws sounds from this spectral instrument, in the London premiere of Finnish composer Kalevi Aho's Lapland-inspired theremin concerto Eight Seasons. John Storgårds conducts the BBC Philharmonic, and the concert ends with subversive Russian composer Shostakovich's 15th and final symphony.
Read more ...Prom 28: Mozart Momentum No 1
From Mozart's phenomenally productive mid-1780s came his opera The Marriage of Figaro, and a clutch of orchestral and chamber works. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra and pianist/director Leif Ove Andsnes (pictured) continue their Mozart Momentum journey through these wondrous years with three consecutive Proms. This, the first, opens with the busy Overture from Figaro before tackling Piano Concertos No 20 and 22. The Momentum continues in the evening, and on Mon 8 Aug.
Read more ...Prom 42: Beethoven and 'The Inextinguishable'
'Music is like life, and like life inextinguishable,' wrote Danish composer Carl Nielsen. To prove it, his Symphony No 4 is dominated by a 'duel' between two sets of timpani which power through the rest of the orchestra. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard perform this exciting work in a full programme that opens with Finnish composer Jean Sibelius's one-movement Symphony No 7 and Beethoven's compelling Piano Concerto No 4, with soloist Francesco Piemontesi (pictured).
Proms 53 & 54: Earth Prom
An audio-visual tour of the globe celebrates unforgettable footage from the BBC Natural History Unit. Composers who have translated the natural world into music over the years include Hans Zimmer and George Fenton. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ben Palmer recaptures, with the BBC's naturalist Chris Packham (pictured) some of the most enthralling moments in decades of nature programming, with evocations of seas, mountains, rivers, glaciers and deserts.
Read more ...Prom 61: Chineke! & Beethoven
Experience the energy of Chineke! Orchestra and Voices in Beethoven's mighty Symphony No 9, known as the Choral for its powerful last movement. In it, four soloists and the chorus sing the emphatic Ode to Joy, adopted as the anthem of the European Union. Performances of the Ode to Joy at the internationally-minded Proms have become highly charged, and you can expect a sea of blue flags with yellow stars... To open this concert by Europe's first majority-Black and ethnically diverse orchestra, Lilacs by the Black American composer George Walker, based on Walt Whitman's elegy to President Lincoln.
Read more ...Glass Handel
A brilliant new venture for the Proms: English National Opera, ethereal countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo (pictured in ENO's Akhnaten), artist George Condo, beatboxer Jason Singh, designer and co-creative director of Prada Raf Simons and choreographer Justin Peck come together for a multimedia event in South London's atmospheric new venue Printworks, formerly the print site of Harmsworth newspapers. In place of the Daily Mail rolling off the presses, you'll find music by the American minimalist Philip Glass, and spellbinding arias from Handel's operas. Devised by Costanzo himself. This programme of technical brilliance and luminous melody, to a standing audience, promises to be a really outstanding event.
Read more ...Prom 72: The Last Night of the Proms
Book seats for five Proms across the two months of concerts, and you are eligible to enter the ballot for Last Night tickets (apply by 9 June). A further 200 seats go in a ballot open to all (apply by 7 July). Any seats left go on open sale on 15 July. Promenaders have access to 1,000 or so standing places. (Promming was first devised to get more music-lovers in at an affordable price, now £6.) On the Last Night programme, performed by BBC singers and players under Dalia Staveska, and soloists including Sheku Kanneh-Mason (pictured) and soprano Lise Davidsen, Mascagni's Easter Hymn, music by Wagner, Coleridge-Taylor and others, and traditional favourites, including Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea-Songs and Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No 1.
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