The Prom on August 4 was presented by BBC Symphony Orchestra, along with the BBC Symphony Chorus and the Constanza Chorus, conducted by Hannu Tintu. It opened with Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna by Pierre Boulez, in commemoration of the centennial of Boulez’s birth. Written later in his life, when Boulez’s conducting career seemed to limit his compositional activity, Rituel is an austere ceremonial progression of textures and instrumental colors, lasting approximately half an hour. Both its structural strategy and its expressive effect are somewhat reminiscent of Stravinky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. It was given a very effective performance with

The Prom on July 31, presented by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Joshua Weilerstein, as so many of the concerts during this stretch of time, included a work of Rachmaninov, the Symphonic Dances, which ended the concert. It began with Symphony No. 2 by Elsa Barraine, a composer unknown before this point to this listener. Barraine was a French composer, trained at the Paris Conservatory, where she was a student of Paul Dukas. The fact that she was a woman and Jewish and politically active made her life, both personal and professional, difficult during the time leading up to

The performers for the Prom concert on July 28 were the BBC Scottish Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. The first piece, and, for a certain cohort, the most important was Earth Dances by Harrison Birtwistle. Written during 1985 and 1986, it is one of his major single movement pieces for large orchestra. The work features six strata, each with a characteristic intervallic “hierarcy,” register, and rhythmic characteristic. The interaction and progression of those strata, which defines its structure, produces a sense of a certain menacing quality and a sort of subterranean intensity, driving to a climax which Jonathan Cross in

On the 18th and 19th of August Dave Smith’s 75th birthday was celebrated at Café Oto with two concerts of his music, performed by Jan Steele, Janet Sherbourne, and himself. Each concert began with Smith, who is an extremely masterly pianist performing works of his, and concluded with Steele and Sherbourne performing his major work, Albanian Summer. Albanian Summer was written in 1980 for Steele and Sherbourne, and performed widely by them for a while. These performances were the first in about 30 years. The work is a sort of travelog of a number of summers that Smith spent in

The Prom on August 10 was presented by The National Youth Orchestra, conducted by Alexandre Bloch and Tess Jackson. The 160 members of the orchestra, who completely filled the stage, were joined by the almost as large cohort of NYO Inspire, who were in various places in the hall, including the gallery, some boxes, the choir seating areas behind the stage, and, eventually, in the aisles of the stalls. The program began with the Overture to The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner, and concluded with the Symphony No. 1 of Gustav Mahler. In between those were two works, Orpheus Undone

The late-night Prom on August 9, presented by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment, conducted by Chloe Rooke, was devoted to a single work, Songs of Wars I Have Seen by Heiner Goebbels. The work was written in 2007 for those same two groups, on commission from the Southbank Centre, for the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall after its two year-long renovation. Songs of Wars I Have Seen is based on Gertrude Stein’s book detailing her life in occupied France during World War II. The ins and outs of how Stein and her companion

The BBC Prom on August 7 was presented by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by John Storgårds. It featured Stefan Dohr as soloist in the Horn Concerto by Hans Abrahamsen, written between 2018 and 2019. The work is mostly a monologue by the soloist which is provided with a luminous and quite beautiful backdrop, sometimes reactive and interactive, and sometimes just a background, but always aurally compelling. Although the movements are designated by tempo, they are really differentiated more by the density of the, as it were, accompaniment than by the actually speed of the music. At the end of the

One of the focuses of this year’s Proms, concentrated during the month of August, was the centennial of György Ligeti. The first of these, presented on August 11 by The London Philharmonic Orchestra, along with the London Philharmonic Choir, the Royal Northern College of Music Chamber Choir, and the Edvard Grieg Kor, conducted by Edward Gardner, started in what might be the most obvious place, especially for drawing a large audience, focusing on the music used in Stanley Kurbrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The movie certainly introduced Liget’s music to a larger audience than it had ever received before that

The late night Prom on August 9, was billed as Mindful Mix Prom. It was presented by Ola Gjello, along with Ruby Aspinall, the Carducci String Quartet, and VOCES8. It was a little difficult initially for one to know exactly what one was in store for. The advanced material invited one to “relax into a late night musical meditation” which would explore “the universal, timeless themes of night, stillness and prayer through the lens of composers old and new,” with a playlist that “drifts from Renaissance to Radiohead.” In a Proms program for an earlier concert, Tom Service’s “The Proms

The Prom on August 26 was presented by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and their conductor, Nicholas Collon, joined by violinist Pekka Kuusisto. The program opened with La Mer by Debussy, which was given an extremely shaped and nuanced and always beautiful sounding performance. It was followed by Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending in a very beautiful and thoughtful and very quiet and moving performance featuring Kuusisto. The Vaughan Williams and Märchentänze by Thomas Adès made a very interesting and thought provoking paring. The Vaughan Williams, written just before the first world war, was one of his first works to