BBC Proms 2022

Giuseppe Verdi had a complicated relationship with religion: he asked to be buried with just ‘one priest, one candle, one cross’. But as a born dramatist, he knew how to tell a great story – and his colossal Requiem encompasses death, rebirth and the end of the world itself, in music that simply blazes with passion and power. Now, in the vast spaces of the Royal Albert Hall, Sakari Oramo assembles two choruses, a multinational team of solo singers (including 2021 Cardiff Singer of the World Song Prize winner Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha) and the full forces of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and prepares to raise the roof. A truly spectacular First Night of the 2022 BBC Proms.

British conductor John Wilson has long been a Proms favourite, but last year’s debut appearance of his new super-orchestra the Sinfonia of London caused a sensation. ‘Astonishing,’ wrote The Times. For The Spectator, this was ‘an orchestra so thrillingly alive with the sheer glory of it all that hearing them play felt like being a teenager in love’. Now Wilson and the Sinfonia are back, in an all-British programme that pairs much-loved classics by Elgar and Vaughan-Williams with Walton’s kaleidoscopic Partita, Bax’s stirring musical seascape and Huw Watkins’s spirited Flute Concerto, played by its dedicatee Adam Walker.

Celebrating the BBC’s centenary year, the Proms partners with Radio 1 Relax for a late-night wind-down. Relax with Radio 1’s Chillest Show presenter Sian Eleri, who appears onstage to introduce a stripped-back set of collaborations and explorations.

Happy and glorious: the story of British music is inextricably linked with royalty, and down the centuries composers ranging from Handel and Elgar to Walton, Parry and Vaughan Williams have risen to royal occasions with music of breath-taking pageantry, beauty and power. In the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee year the BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Singers present a celebration of music and royalty in all its splendour: from the music of the Tudor court to Britten’s Coronation opera Gloriana, by way of Handel’s majestic Coronation Anthems, choral music by the current Master of the Queen’s Music Judith Weir, and a specially commissioned new work by Cheryl Frances-Hoad.

‘Behold, the sea itself!’ Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony takes the poetry of Walt Whitman and opens the floodgates to a spring tide of inspiration. Andrew Manze’s Vaughan Williams recordings have been praised for their ‘rare sensitivity and warmth’, and in the composer’s 150th-anniversary year, A Sea Symphony gets the deluxe treatment from two of the BBC’s great symphonic choruses, plus the operatic voices of soloists Elizabeth Llewellyn and Andrew Foster-Williams. But the concert opens the way Vaughan Williams would have wanted: with a surging musical seascape from his Welsh pupil Grace Williams, and an equally nautical opener by Doreen Carwithen, composed in 1952 and receiving its first Proms performance in this, her centenary year.

Life on a French river barge is tough, and for a young wife it can be lonely too. But in this closed and arduous world, even a dream of a better world can spark jealousy. Il tabarro is a side of Puccini that’s too rarely seen – a gritty, red-blooded drama of life on the edge, told with all his flair for melody and suspense. Who better to perform it than Sir Mark Elder, one of our greatest living opera conductors, and the orchestra that he’s directed for over two decades – the Hallé. Natalya Romaniw stars as the lovelorn Giorgetta; first, though, Elder and his orchestra conjure up Dukas’s musical magic spell, and join Respighi amid the glittering Fountains of Rome.

Fantastic worlds, epic adventures, complex characters and huge moral choices – the universe of computer gaming is a natural match for orchestral music, and in the 21st century games have created a huge and passionate global audience for some of the most vivid, ambitious and inventive music currently being written for symphony orchestra. In this first ever Gaming Prom, Robert Ames – best-known at the Proms for his explorations of sci-fi and electroacoustic music – takes an electronically expanded Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on an odyssey from the classic console titles of the 1980s, through Jessica Curry’s haunted soundscapes to the European concert premiere of music from Hildur Guðnadóttir’s and Sam Slater’s score for Battlefield 2042.

The newly formed Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, made up of Ukrainian musicians – some from Ukraine’s major cities, some now displaced as refugees, and others who play in European orchestras – is a special late addition to this year’s Proms. Under Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson the orchestra is a symbol of the remarkable resolve and determination shown by the people of Ukraine during the dark months of conflict – but also a beacon of hope for peace. They celebrate Ukraine’s leading living composer, Valentin Silvestrov, who escaped Kyiv with his daughter and granddaughter in March. ‘It is now clear how little we appreciate the times when peace reigns,’ he has since said, ‘and how fragile civilisation is.’

When Mozart composed his piano concertos, he had a very specific performer in mind – himself. For Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, that’s part of the appeal. ‘When you realise how quickly Mozart developed during the early years of the 1780s it makes you ask: why did this happen? What was going on?’ Tonight, this endlessly engaging, multi-award-winning pianist puts himself in Mozart’s shoes, as he plays two contrasting masterworks from 1785: the tempestuous and tender Concerto No. 20, and the sunny, gloriously playful Concerto No. 22. Throughout, he’ll direct the Mahler Chamber Orchestra from the keyboard, just as Mozart would have done. Expect eloquence, insight and (because this is Mozart, after all) lots and lots of fun.

No prizes for identifying the real hero of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. With its swashbuckling self-confidence and self-mocking humour, this ‘Hero’s Life’ is very much the world according to Richard Strauss – an exuberant, off-the-scale showpiece for the Oslo Philharmonic, making its first Proms appearance under its recently appointed and widely acclaimed Chief Conductor Klaus Makëlä. Joining them, in Liszt’s First Piano Concerto is the phenomenal Yuja Wang, who’s said that she ‘feels like a rock star’ when playing at the Proms. Sibelius’s awe-inspiring panorama of the Finnish forests opens a high-octane evening with one of Europe’s great orchestras, and two of the most talked-about classical musicians in the world today.

Three composers, three landscapes. Elgar wrote his Cello Concerto in the woodlands of Sussex; for many listeners, its autumnal colours evoke emotions too deep for words. From his home in Finland, Sibelius created a symphony that has the grandeur and inevitability of a great river – though some have heard it as a stirring song of national awakening. And elemental forces are the very bedrock of Anna Thorvaldsottir’s inspiration. The BBC Philharmonic, under Eva Kollinainen – a Finnish conductor with close links to Iceland – teams up with charismatic soloist Kian Soltani in Elgar’s hugely popular concerto, and gives the world premiere of a newly forged orchestral work by Iceland-born Anna Thorvaldsottir, for whom composition is ‘a natural part of my life’.

‘I think and feel in sounds,’ said Maurice Ravel. So, when he wrote his ballet Daphnis and Chloe, he created a sumptuous musical panorama in which you can hear every drop of dew, every flurry of birdsong and every ray of glittering light. Sounds thrilling? Now hear it performed by the ‘world’s greatest orchestra of teenagers’ – playing with an energy and joy that make even the Royal Albert Hall feel a bit on the small side. The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain’s annual Prom is always a highlight of the season, and tonight its 150-plus players are working on a cinematic scale: Simone Dinnerstein performs Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and there’s a spectacular, specially commissioned opener from Hollywood legend Danny Elfman.

Viennese orchestral playing is a byword for excellence, rooted in generations of tradition. But under its distinguished (and adventurous) American Music Director Marin Alsop, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra takes that tradition as a starting point to look outwards – to explore. Bartók’s bloodcurdling ballet suite prepares the way for Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto: energising, unsentimental brilliance, brought to life by former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Benjamin Grosvenor. And then, two very different facets of the Central European tradition: the windswept drama and dancing Bohemian melodies of Dvořák’s magnificent Seventh Symphony, and the UK premiere of Heliosis – written specially for Alsop and the Vienna RSO by a young Viennese composer with a flair for drama.

In her 80th-anniversary year – and 50 years since the release of her album Young, Gifted and Black – the Proms pays tribute to the ‘Queen of Soul’, Aretha Franklin. A singer, songwriter, pianist and one of the best-selling recording artists of all time, whose song ‘Respect’ became an anthem of the American Civil Rights Movement, Franklin is remembered in a unique Prom featuring a collection of her greatest hits with a dynamic orchestral backing. Jules Buckley conducts his newly formed ensemble in its Proms debut, joined by American singer-songwriter and Quincy Jones protégée Sheléa.

Cynthia Erivo is a creative phenomenon: a London-born, Tony, Grammy and Emmy award-winning actress, singer, songwriter and producer, whose career has taken her from her childhood in South London to the West End and Broadway, and whose recordings have also thrilled audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Tonight, backed by the BBC Concert Orchestra she salutes the legendary female voices that have shown her the way: artists such as Nina Simone, Shirley Bassey, Billie Holiday and Gladys Knight. ‘I wanted to pay homage to them,’ she says. ‘Women who have influenced my sound, the music I’ve listened to, and the way I tell my story.’

The end has come, and in the silence after the Last Trumpet, a solitary bird is the only sound heard on Earth. The ambition of Gustav Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony staggers the imagination – an emotional odyssey on a cosmic scale that embraces tenderness, rage, dark humour and – yes – the end of the world itself. Sir Simon Rattle was still a teenager when he conducted his first performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, and it’s been a personal touchstone at every stage of his career. Now, as he prepares to step down as Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra, he pairs it with a short (but very personal) tribute from the late Harrison Birtwistle, one of Britain’s most distinguished recent composers.

Over a century of public service broadcasting, the BBC has forged a global reputation for its coverage of the planet we call home – from the oceans and mountains to rivers, glaciers, deserts and the infinite wonders of life on Earth itself. Tonight, the Proms hosts a stunning audio-visual celebration of the BBC’s world-famous Natural History Unit, from David Attenborough’s pioneering early adventures through to the landmark series of the 21st century. Expect breath-taking images, natural sounds, spoken words and music by composers including Hans Zimmer and George Fenton, performed live in the spectacular surroundings of the Royal Albert Hall by Ben Palmer and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Archive footage, dancing astronauts and a flashing, blinking Sputnik right here in the Royal Albert Hall – when cult ‘retro-futurists’ Public Service Broadcasting brought The Race to Space to the Proms in 2019, it’s safe to say that the results were out of this world. So in the year that the BBC celebrates a century of – well, public-service broadcasting – it makes perfect sense to invite them back with This New Noise: a joyously eclectic, album-length celebration of 100 years of BBC Radio, backed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and delivered with all the wit and showmanship of a band on an ongoing mission to ‘teach the lessons of the past through the music of the future’.

‘Be embraced, all you millions!’ Since the earliest days of the Proms, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has had a special place in each season – and with its climactic choral ‘Ode to Joy’, it’s one of those works that takes on a new meaning every time it’s played. This year, it’s performed by Chineke! – Europe’s first majority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra, along with Chineke! Voices. BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Nicole Cabell leads a world-class team of solo singers, and opens the Prom with the haunting Lilacs, the heartfelt song-cycle with which George Walker became the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

‘Nicola Benedetti – now, she really can play,’ says the American composer, trumpeter and all-round jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, and after Benedetti gave the world premiere of the concerto that he composed for her in 2015, The Guardian wrote of her ‘sparky performance’. Thomas Søndergård and The Royal Scottish National Orchestra gives its Proms premiere tonight: the big, generous heart of a concert with a spring in its step, that opens with Thomas Adès’s wonderfully sleazy Powder her Face suite and ends amid the headstrong urban energy of West Side Story. In between comes a blast of fresh sea air from Benjamin Britten.

It’s time to put on your party clothes, grab your favourite flag and raise the roof of the Royal Albert Hall! There’s nothing quite like the Last Night of the Proms – the happiest annual celebration in the classical music calendar. BBC Symphony Orchestra Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska returns to host a concert that stars soprano Lise Davidsen and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason in party pieces by Verdi, Wagner and Coleridge-Taylor, as well as a salute to a century of innovation from rising British composer James B. Wilson – before giving the 2022 BBC Proms a send-off with all the traditional Last Night favourites. Until next year!

It’s time to put on your party clothes, grab your favourite flag and raise the roof of the Royal Albert Hall! There’s nothing quite like the Last Night of the Proms – the happiest annual celebration in the classical music calendar. BBC Symphony Orchestra Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska returns to host a concert that stars soprano Lise Davidsen and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason in party pieces by Verdi, Wagner and Coleridge-Taylor, as well as a salute to a century of innovation from rising British composer James B. Wilson – before giving the 2022 BBC Proms a send-off with all the traditional Last Night favourites. Until next year!

Join CBeebies for an ocean adventure travelling the musical world in the Royal Albert Hall submarine to find endangered creatures and tackle tricky environmental problems. The musical repertoire played by the Southbank Sinfonia is: Argentum (excerpt) by Dani Howard Dolphin Dance ( BBC Commission) by Dominque le Gendre Overture from 'Wassermusik' by Georg Philipp Telemann The Fairy Garden from 'Mother Goose' by Maurice Ravel G.R.S. from 'Enigma Variations' by Edward Elgar Storm from 'Peter Grimes' by Benjamin Britten Whalesong (BBC Commission) by Mason Bates CBeebies Medley arranged by Daniel Whibley Celebration Dance by Eleanor Alberga