BBC Proms 2023 announced: three of Choir & Organ’s 2023 New Music composers have Proms premieres
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
BBC Singers will perform at five Proms, including the First and Last Nights and a Late Night Prom, showcasing their broad range of repertoire
The BBC has launched its 2023 Proms season.
The 84 concerts will run from 14 July to 9 September, based largely in the Proms’ traditional home, London’s Royal Albert Hall (RAH), but this year also introducing a festival weekend at Sage Gateshead as well as concerts at Guildhall Londonderry, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Dewsbury Town Hall, Hall for Cornwall in Truro, Perth Concert Hall, and the Hippodrome in Great Yarmouth.
The season will mark a number of anniversaries, including Sergei Rachmaninov (b.1873), William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes (both died 400 years ago), Croatian composer Dora Pejačević (d.1923), and Hungarian composer György Ligeti (b.1923).
The BBC Singers will perform at five Proms, including the First and Last Nights and a Late Night Prom, showcasing their broad range of repertoire.
Sir John Eliot Gardiner, in his 80th birthday year, will conduct the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique in a complete performance of Berlioz’s five-act grand opera The Trojans (3 September). Large-scale choral works include Handel’s Samson (23 August, Allan Clayton, Jacquelyn Stucker, Academy of Ancient Music, Laurence Cummings); Mendelssohn’s Elijah (29 July, Roderick Williams, Carolyn Sampson, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Maxim Emelyanychev); Rachmaninov’s The Bells (26 July, Hallé Choir and Orchestra, BBC Symphony Chorus, Sir Mark Elder); Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and Orff’s Carmina burana (27 July, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Kazuki Yamada); and Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast (4 August, BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Klaus Mäkelä).
Three of Choir & Organ’s 2023 New Music composers – Kristina Arakelyan, Grace-Evangeline Mason and James B. Wilson – have Proms premieres (respectively, 22 July, Sage Gateshead; 18 July, RAH; Last Night, RAH).
This year also sees the Proms debut of Canadian organist Isabelle Demers (26 August), in a programme of works by Bach, Reger, Coleridge-Taylor, William Grant Still, the world premiere of Canadian composer Rachel Laurin’s Prelude & Fugue in G major, and Demers’s own transcription of excerpts from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. RAH associate artist Anna Lapwood makes her Proms solo recital debut with a programme of music by (among others) Debussy, Kristina Arakelyan, Philip Glass and Hans Zimmer (25 July).
Marin Alsop will lead the Last Night of the Proms on 9 September.
Every Prom at the Royal Albert Hall and ‘Proms at’ chamber concert across the UK will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, with most of the concerts available on BBC Sounds for 12 months. BBC television and BBC iPlayer will broadcast 24 programmes, including the First Night and Last Night of the Proms, and these will be available to watch on iPlayer for 12 months.
Ticket prices: with seats from £9; half-price tickets for under-18s (plus booking fees); Promming day standing tickets £8 (inclusive of booking fees).
