British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor is no stranger to the Proms: in fact, since he made his Proms debut, performing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the First Night in 2011, he has become something of a Proms veteran. However, this concert marked his debut in the Chamber Proms, held at Cadogan Hall. The popular and […]
The final Chamber Prom of this season offered a pause to savour the music of the great English Renaissance lutenist, singer and composer John Dowland, whose 450th birthday falls this year. Dowland’s music epitomizes the spirit of melancholy, fashionable in the Elizabethan period, and his most famous work is the Lacrimae, a set of seven […]
An intimate portrait of Benjamin Britten, as seen through a sequence of bittersweet songs for voice and piano and voice and guitar, provided the perfect antidote to the Wagner marathon at the Proms. The concert included an intense and very moving performance of the Canticle ‘Abraham and Isaac’ with tenor James Gilchrist, soprano Ruby Hughes […]
The Little Proms is an initiative to bring classical music to a wider audience, and, like Classical Revolution and various projects by the ever-innovative Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, The Little Proms presents classical music outside the traditional setting of the concert hall to make it more accessible, and to dispel the myths about […]
As English as Earl Grey tea, wasps at a picnic, warm beer, wet summers, Rupert Brooke, and Andy Murray not getting past the semis at Wimbledon, the Last Night of the Proms is a fine tradition and a much-loved national treasure. Music snobs and cynics may criticise the Last Night (and indeed other programmes in […]
This time last year I wrote a piece for this blog arguing for a change of venue for the Proms, London’s two-month summer classical music festival. We’re a fortnight into the current season, and I have already attended two Prom concerts, courtesy of Bachtrack. One was at Cadogan Hall, a lovely venue just off Sloane […]
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 