About this season
The World's Greatest Classical Music Festival. The BBC Proms is a classical music festival held every summer at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and in recent years has explored an innovative series of Proms around the UK with concerts in all four nations. Its aim: to bring the best in classical music to the widest possible audience, which remains true to founder-conductor Henry Wood’s original vision in 1895. Whether you are a classical connoisseur or think classical music isn’t for you, there is something for everyone in the eight-week stretch of concerts.
Episodes (30)
1. First Night of the Proms
Aired 13 July 2018 • 180 min
An all-British concert launches the 2018 season. Vaughan Williams atmospheric Whitman settings and Holst’s ever-popular 1918 suite The Planets sit alongside a new collaboration by Anna Meredith and 59 Productions.
2. BBC Young Musician 40th Anniversary
Aired 15 July 2018 • 180 min
BBC Young Musician celebrates its 40th birthday with a concert featuring illustrious past winners and finalists, including Nicola Benedetti, Freddy Kempf and Sheku Kanneh-Mason, as well as this year’s winner. With music by Ravel and Saint-Saëns.
3. Jacob Collier and Friends
Aired 19 July 2018 • 180 min
23-year-old vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and arranger Jacob Collier is already a multi-Grammy Award-winner. Here he teams up with Jules Buckley, the Metropole Orkest and special guests Sam Amidon and Take 6 for a special Proms performance.
4. Youthful Beginnings
Aired 20 July 2018 • 180 min
Mendelssohn’s precocious First Piano Concerto joins Schumann’s forward-looking Fourth Symphony and music by Lili Boulanger and Morfydd Owen – both of whom died tragically young – in the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s first Prom of the season.
5. Pioneers of Sound
Aired 23 July 2018 • 180 min
The London Contemporary Orchestra leads a late-night tribute to the legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – pioneers of experimental electronic music – which includes Daphne Oram’s groundbreaking Still Point and music by RW stalwart Delia Derbyshire.
6. Beethoven, Shostakovich & Rachmaninov
Aired 23 July 2018 • 180 min
Karina Canellakis directs the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two Russian classics: Rachmaninov’s exhilarating Symphonic Dances and Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, with Alisa Weilerstein as soloist. Beethoven’s spirited overture Coriolan opens the concert.
7. Paul Lewis plays Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ concerto
Aired 25 July 2018 • 180 min
A concert of darkness and light opens with the world premiere of Tansy Davies’s 9/11-inspired What Did We See? and closes with Brahms’s sunny Second Symphony. Paul Lewis joins Ben Gernon and the BBC Philharmonic for Beethoven’s 'Emperor' Concerto.
8. Parry, Vaughan Williams & Holst
Aired 27 July 2018 • 180 min
Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending and Pastoral Symphony sit alongside music by Holst and Parry’s stirring Fifth Symphony in this centenary celebration of Hubert Parry – father of 20th-century English music. Martyn Brabbins conducts the BBC NOW.
9. Havana Meets Kingston
Aired 31 July 2018 • 180 min
Leading reggae and dancehall producer Mister Savona brings together some of Cuba and Jamaica’s most influential musicians for a concert combing the sounds of roots reggae, dub and dancehall with son, salsa and Afro-Cuban to create a new musical fusion.
10. Folk Music around Britain and Ireland
Aired 3 August 2018 • 180 min
The BBC Concert Orchestra collaborates with some of the folk world’s leading musicians, including Julie Fowlis, The Unthanks and Sam Lee, in a concert that celebrates traditional music while also looking to the future of this ever-evolving genre.
11. NYO perform Mussorgsky, Ligeti and Debussy
Aired 4 August 2018 • 180 min
George Benjamin and the National Youth Orchestra in a concert of orchestral masterworks that includes Debussy’s La Mer and Ligeti’s mesmerising Lontano. Pianist Tamara Stefanovich is the soloist in Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand.
12. Brahms's A German Requiem
Aired 7 August 2018 • 180 min
Richard Farnes conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soloists Golda Schultz and Johan Reuter in Brahms’s much-loved Requiem. Marking Thea Musgrave’s 90th birthday, the performance opens with her dramatic Phoenix Rising.
13. New York: Sound of a City
Aired 8 August 2018 • 180 min
Celebrating the music of a modern New York, the Heritage Orchestra and conductor Jules Buckley present the sound of NYC. With guest artists drawn from across the Big Apple, expect anything from pagan-gospel and disco-punk to feminist rap or DIY indie.
14. Edward Gardner conducts Elgar & Vaughan Williams
Aired 12 August 2018 • 180 min
The conflict of war runs through this concert by Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Vaughan Williams’s beautiful cantata Dona nobis pacem and Lili Boulanger frame Elgar’s elegiac Cello Concerto.
15. Sir Simon Rattle conducts L’enfant et les sortilèges
Aired 18 August 2018 • 180 min
Ravel’s magical opera The Child and the Spells follows his fairy-tale ballet Mother Goose and the oriental aura of Shéhérazade.
16. Mozart's Clarinet Concerto & Mahler's Fifth Symphony
Aired 19 August 2018 • 180 min
Recreating a Prom conducted by Leonard Bernstein in 1987, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Thomas Dausgaard pair two of the best-loved and most beautiful works in the repertoire: Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
17. Iván Fischer & Budapest Festival Orchestra (II)
Aired 23 August 2018 • 180 min
Dance to the Gypsy rhythms of Hungarian folk music in works by Liszt and Sarasate, while Brahms’s dramatic First Symphony, with its transcendent finale, is at the heart of this second concert by Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra.
18. John Wilson conducts Bernstein's On the Town
Aired 25 August 2018 • 180 min
Launching a Bernstein bank-holiday weekend on what would have been the composer’s 100th birthday, John Wilson conducts Bernstein’s hit Broadway musical On The Town, which follows the adventures of three sailors on shore leave in 1944.
19. Marin Alsop & Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Aired 27 August 2018 • 180 min
Bernstein-protégée Marin Alsop returns to the Proms with one of the great American symphony orchestras to perform a politically charged programme that includes Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony alongside Bernstein’s own Second Symphony.
20. Sir András Schiff plays 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' (Book 2)
Aired 29 August 2018 • 180 min
Following his performance of Book 1 in 2017, distinguished pianist and Bach specialist Sir András Schiff returns to present the complete Book 2 of J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.
21. Youssou Ndour & Le Super Étoile de Dakar
Aired 31 August 2018 • 180 min
Senegalese cultural icon Youssou Ndour makes his Proms debut in a special late-night appearance. He’s joined by his group Le Super Étoile de Dakar for a performance embracing his signature mix of Cuban rumba, hip hop, jazz and soul.
22. Tango Prom
Aired 4 September 2018 • 180 min
Explore the raw sensuality and charged rhythms of the tango in all its guises. The Britten Sinfonia join forces with a tango band to take the dance from its dusty beginning in the streets of Buenos Aires right up to the present day.
23. Last Night of the Proms - Part One
Aired 8 September 2018 • 104 min
The BBC Proms 2018 season comes to a close with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their much-loved former chief conductor and Last Night of the Proms veteran Sir Andrew Davis steering proceedings live from the Royal Albert Hall. Long-standing nautical traditions of the evening are extended in Stanford's Songs of the Sea, featuring Canadian baritone Gerald Finley. The centenary of the end of the Great War is marked with a new work from Roxanna Panufnik, which also rounds off the season's original premieres and features BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus. The evening includes music by Hindemith, Berlioz and Charles Hubert Parry, who is celebrated 100 years after his death with a performance of Blest Pair of Sirens. Coverage also includes visits to Proms in the Parks across the Nation, also celebrating this annual great night in classical music.
24. Last Night of the Proms - Part Two
Aired 8 September 2018 • 90 min
Katie Derham presents live coverage as the Last Night of the Proms continues from the Royal Albert Hall with the ever-popular Marche militaire francaise by Saint-Saens. Award-winning 18-year-old saxophonist Jess Gillam performs Scaramouche by Milhaud, and baritone Gerry Finley performs the song Soliloquy from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel. To mark 100 years since 1918 there is a nationwide sing-around of traditional First World War songs, with contributions from the Proms in the Park events in Colwyn Bay, Glasgow and Belfast. The 2018 Proms are brought to a familiar and much-loved rousing close with Rule Britannia, Land of Hope and Glory, and Jerusalem. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and BBC Singers are conducted by Sir Andrew Davis.