Saturday 14 September • 7.05pm–c10.20pm

William Walton Overture ‘Portsmouth Point’ 6’
Giacomo Puccini Three opera excerpts 9’
Carlos Simon Hellfighters’ Blues BBC co-commission: world premiere c5’
Gabriel Fauré Pavane, Op. 50 7’
Charles Ives Yale–Princeton Football Game 3’
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Summer is gone first performance at the Proms 3’
Grace Williams Fantasia on Welsh NurseryTunes first performance at the Proms 11’
Camille Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No. 5 in F major, Op. 103 ‘Egyptian’ – Andante 11'
INTERVAL: 25 minutes
Iain Farrington Extra Time BBC commission: world premiere c4’
Henry Mancini, arr. Gavin Sutherland The Pink Panther – maintheme first performance of this arrangement at the Proms 3’
Stephen Hough In His Hands – two spirituals BBC commission: world premiere c4’
Ruperto Chapí Las hijas del Zebedeo - ‘Al pensar en el dueño de mis amores’ (Carceleras) 5'
arr. Henry Wood Fantasia on British Sea-Songs (with additional numbers arr. Bob Chilcott
and Gareth Glyn) 13’
concluding with:
Thomas Arne, arr. Malcolm Sargent Rule, Britannia! 5’
Edward Elgar Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 8’
Parry, orch. Elgar Jerusalem 2'
arr. Benjamin Britten The National Anthem 2’
Trad., arr. Paul Campbell Auld Lang Syne 2’
Angel Blue soprano
Sir Stephen Hough piano
BBC Symphony Orchestra Stephen Bryant leader
BBC Symphony Chorus Neil Ferris chorus-master
BBC Singers Neil Ferris choir-master
Sakari Oramo conductor

This concert is broadcast live by BBC Radio 3 and shown tonight on BBC Two (first half) and BBC One (second half). You can listen on BBC Sounds, and watch on BBC iPlayer for 12 months.
Tonight at the Proms
Tonight marks the culmination of a whirlwind series of 90 concerts, not only here at the Royal Albert Hall but also including residencies in Gateshead, Bristol and Nottingham as well as performances in Aberdeen, Newport and Belfast.
Aside from the customary Last Night favourites there are nods to this season’s anniversary celebrations for two highly contrasting composers, Charles Ives and Henry Mancini.
A new commission by American composer Carlos Simon pays bluesy tribute to a Black army regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters, and its band, while Grace Williams weaves together nursery tunes from Wales; and, in the year that Bizet’s Carmen came to the Proms, there’s a Spanish flavour by way of a solo from a Spanish zarzuela.
Angel Blue is tonight’s star soprano soloist, making her Proms debut, and Sir Stephen Hough makes his first appearance here as composer/arranger, as well as his 31st visit in his more familiar guise, as pianist.
Enjoy the party, and we look forward to welcoming you back to the Proms next year!
(Image: Chris Christodoulou/BBC)

William Walton (1902–83)
Overture ‘Portsmouth Point’ (1924–5)

Portsmouth Point was Walton’s first published work, his first to be widely played and the one in which his trademark style of roistering orchestral brilliance clearly emerges for the first time. Samples of ‘pre-Walton’ Walton had included a large-scale, Schoenbergian string quartet that had impressed Alban Berg at a concert in Salzburg in 1923, but Walton had already begun to realise that such creations were not going to win him many performances back home in conservative England.
He therefore turned to another living master-composer’s example. Stravinsky’s influence shows in Portsmouth Point’s torrent of complex rhythms, considered at the time to be so difficult that Walton, almost by default, often ended up conducting the work himself. But the music’s crackling energy, roguish manner and tangy scoring are all authentic Walton fingerprints, owing much to the 1920s Jazz Age.
The title comes from an etching by Rowlandson, portraying a slice of colourful, rowdy, alcohol-lubricated life on an 18th-century quayside.
•••
Walton once said that the breezy C major opening idea for full orchestra had occurred to him on the upper deck of a No.22 London bus. This and related motifs are cheerfully explored further, before a shift of key leads to a new theme for unaccompanied woodwind. This is seized on at once by the rest of the orchestra (including a galumphing tuba). Then the main idea returns, and bits of it and the woodwind tune are tossed from one orchestral section to another in a riotous conclusion.
Programme note © Malcolm Hayes
Malcolm Hayes is a composer, writer, broadcaster and music journalist. He contributes regularly to BBC Music Magazine and edited The Selected Letters of William Walton. His BBC-commissioned Violin Concerto was performed at the Proms in 2016.
Placing of the chaplet
Before the next item, the bust of Proms founder-conductor Henry Wood (upstage, centre) will be decorated with a chaplet. This honour is normally performed during the Last Night performance by two Promenaders. The bust, recovered from the ruins of the bombed-out Queen’s Hall (the original home of these concerts) in 1941, stands onstage throughout the Proms season and is kindly loaned each year by the Royal Academy of Music.
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)
Three opera excerpts

Gianni Schicchi (1918) – ‘O mio babbino caro’
Madam Butterfly (1904) – Humming Chorus
Tosca (1900) – ‘Vissi d’arte’
Angel Blue soprano
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
Opera is an art form all about channelling the emotional power of the human voice – and no composer ever did that quite like Giacomo Puccini. Almost a century after his death, his operas are some of the most regularly performed globally. Three– La bohème, Tosca and Madam Butterfly – are among the 10 most programmed works in opera, a record matched only by Mozart. But even in Puccini’s own time his most popular arias had a life of their own, far beyond the opera house. His tenor solos made Enrico Caruso the world’s first recording star and many football fans will still recognise ‘Nessun dorma’, thanks to the Three Tenors and the 1990 World Cup.
The secret to Puccini’s success? The same things that long saw him dismissed by critics: his unerring instinct for a good tune, his ability to work subtle magic with the simplest musical materials and his capacity to get straight to the heart of the matter.
‘O mio babbino caro’ features as a brief moment of stillness in Puccini’s operatic comedy Gianni Schicchi (1918). As the young woman Lauretta begs her father to allow her to marry the man she loves, Puccini lends her voice the airiest of orchestral accompaniments, all rippling harp and lush strings. The tune is almost childlike in its simplicity: what matters is Lauretta’s earnest, deeply felt adoration.
The Humming Chorus functions as another extraordinary moment in its original context. It marks the passing of an entire night in Madam Butterfly (1904), as the title-character awaits the return of Pinkerton, the man she thinks of as her husband. There are no words. Plucked strings and staccato woodwind mark time like a ticking clock, while the humming itself is a kind of operatic sound effect, spooling through a long melody as if spinning out time itself.
None of Puccini’s operas is dramatically pacier than Tosca (1900). The title-character Floria Tosca – a professional opera singer – sings ‘Vissi d’arte’ as she considers giving herself to the appalling police chief Scarpia in exchange for a pardon for her lover, who has been sentenced to death. At first her voice moves in parallel with the strings, as if in duet with the orchestra. But when she asks God why he has abandoned her in such desperation, Puccini gives her prayer-like repeated notes, with the orchestra doing most of the expressive work, which blossoms into one of his most irresistibly soaring melodies.
Programme note © Flora Willson
Flora Willson is a cultural historian of music and teaches at King’s College London. She also writes for The Guardian and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 broadcasts.
Carlos Simon (born 1986)
Hellfighters’ Blues (2024)
BBC co-commission with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra (Washington DC): world premiere

James Reese Europe (1880–1919) was considered to be the leading figure on the Black American music scene in New York City at the beginning of the 20th century. He was the bandleader for the Harlem Hellfighters, the 369th Infantry Regiment, made up mostly of Black Americans during the First World War. When the infantry’s band went to play in France in 1918, its members became the first Black Americans known for bringing Jazz to Europe.
The band’s first concert in France included a syncopated arrangement of the patriotic American march ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ as well as the well-known ragtime piece Memphis Blues by W. C. Handy. To honour the legacy of James Reese Europe and the Hellfighters, I have used the melodic material from Memphis Blues, as well the harmonic structure from the 12-bar blues.
Hellfighters’ Blues features the brass by way of solos written in the style of those early ragtime players, with jubilant blues riffs and jazz shakes. Using counterpoint in the woodwinds and strings, the piece comes to a whimsical close with the strings playing the highest notes possible followed by an answer in the percussion.
Programme note © Carlos Simon
Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)
Pavane, Op. 50 (1887)

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
Gabriel Fauré’s Pavane, composed in 1887, sprang from a moment of nostalgia in French culture for the graceful 18th-century world of the artist Henri Watteau. An Arcadian ideal – images of courtly love among the fountains, with plangent serenades accompanied by plucked strings – is conjured up in poems such as Paul Verlaine’s ‘Clair de lune’ and ‘Mandoline’, which Fauré also set exquisitely to music.
The Pavane’s limpid delicacy rather belied the composer’s personal situation. He and his wife, Marie Fauré-Fremiet, had two small sons and he was working himself into the ground to make ends meet. He told a friend that his teaching jobs entailed three hours’ train travel a day and that he longed to see ‘other landscapes than the everlasting Saint-Lazare station’… The only new thing I have been able to compose during this shuttlecock existence is a Pavane – elegant, assuredly, but not particularly important.’
The original, without chorus, was intended for the Danbé Concerts orchestra; there is also a version for solo piano. The choral incarnation, however, was intended for the salon of Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe, among the wealthiest of Fauré’s friendly Parisian patronesses.
Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1855–1921), had, Fauré told the Countess, ‘most kindly accepted the egregiously thankless and difficult task of setting to this music, which is already complete, words that will make our Pavane fit to be both danced and sung … If the whole marvellous thing with a lovely dance in fine costumes and an invisible chorus and orchestra could be performed, what a treat it would be!’ She took the hint. In 1891 she held a party on an island in the Bois de Boulogne at which exactly such a performance took place.
The chorus slots discreetly into the Pavane’s sparse textures, while the words pick up on the Grecian nymphs-and-shepherds world. In an approximately three-part ABA form, plus a linking passage after the contrasting central episode and an extended coda, the Pavane is uncomplicated enough. Yet in its modally influenced melody and restrained character, Fauré catches the special balance between longing and introversion and between purity and sensuality that often lends his works their almost accidental magic.
Programme note © Jessica Duchen
Jessica Duchen’s music journalism appears in The Sunday Times, the i and BBC Music Magazine. She is the author of seven novels, three plays, biographies of Fauré and Korngold and the librettos for Roxanna Panufnik’s operas Silver Birch and Dalia, commissioned by Garsington Opera.
Charles Ives (1874–1954)
Yale–Princeton Football Game
(?1898, arr. 1970)

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
This piece would seem to belong to a group of ‘cartoons or take-offs’ that Ives noted in his catalogue as having been sparked off by ‘undergraduate and other events (academic, anthropic, urban, athletic, and tragic)’.
Yale–Princeton Football Game needs a sports commentator to do it justice. It’s an impression of a game between the universities that took place in 1897; presumably Ives, who was then a student at Yale, drew it from life. Except that the whole match is over so quickly– ‘Two Minutes in Sounds for Two Halfs within Bounds’, Ives called it – everything is there. In his Memos he remarked that ‘to try to reflect a football game in sounds would cause anybody to try many combinations etc. –for instance, picturing the old wedge play (close formation)– what is more natural than starting with all hugging together in the whole chromatic scale, and gradually pushing together down to one note at the end. The suspense and excitement of spectators – strings going up and down, off and on open-string tremolos. Cheers … running plays (trumpets going all over, dodging, etc., etc.)– natural and fun to do and listen to – hard to play.’
Programme note © Paul Griffiths
A former critic for The Times and The New Yorker, Paul Griffiths is an authority on 20th- and 21st-century music. Among his books are studies of Boulez, Cage and Stravinsky, as well as Modern Music and After (OUP, 2011, 3rd edition) and A Concise History of Western Music (CUP, 2006). He is also a novelist.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912)
Summer is gone (1911)
first performance at the Proms

BBC Singers
Though Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a household name in his lifetime, especially for his cantata trilogy The Song of Hiawatha, his music nearly vanished after his death in 1912, aged 37. The son of an English mother and Sierra Leonean father, he became one of the first students of colour at the Royal College of Music, where his composition teacher was Charles Stanford.
Stanford was a major influence on his partsongs, of which there are around 30. Summer is gone dates from 1911, a time when Coleridge-Taylor was working at feverish pace, juggling several conducting posts and three teaching jobs while also writing incidental music for Othello at His Majesty’s Theatre, the oratorio A Tale of Old Japan and the Violin Concerto.
Christina Rossetti’s poem depicts a symbolic, sorrowful scene as first summer ends, then autumn. A chromatically descending melodic line captures the atmosphere of emotional anguish. Finally, reprising the first words, the coda presents a new idea and a tender resolution.
Programme note © Jessica Duchen
Grace Williams (1906–77)
Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940)
first performance at the Proms

The Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes was written in 1940, during Williams’s years in England, and first performed in a BBC broadcast in October 1941. Its tuneful evocation of childhood clearly had a wide appeal in wartime Britain, and it soon gained frequent performances; it has remained Williams’s best-known work.
The traditional melodies of the piece (scrupulously identified by the composer’s biographer, Malcolm Boyd) are the ebullient ‘Jim Cro’ (also known as ‘Dacw mam yn dŵad’) and ‘Deryn y bwn o’r Banna’ (Bittern from the Beacons), the rhythmic ‘Migildi, magildi’, the dreaming lullaby ‘Si hei lwli ’mabi’ (Sleep, my baby), the playful ‘Gee, geffyl bach’ (Gee-up, little horse), the flowing ‘Cysga di, fy mhlentyn tlws’ (Sleep, my sweet child), the expressive ‘Yr eneth ffein ddu’ (The pretty dark maid) and the joyful ‘Cadi ha’ (Summer Katie).
The tunes are presented one by one, each followed by discussion and transition (with some unexpected textural and harmonic reminiscences of Smetana’s Má vlast); ‘Jim Cro’ returns to end the piece in its initial mood of bright cheerfulness.
Programme note © Anthony Burton
Anthony Burton is a former BBC Radio 3 producer and presenter, now a freelance writer. He has written programme notes for the BBC Proms almost every season since 1975.
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)
Piano Concerto No. 5 in F major,
Op. 103 ‘Egyptian’ (1894–6)

2 Andante – Allegretto tranquillo quasi andantino – Andante
Sir Stephen Hough piano
On 6 May 1846, the 10-year-old Saint-Saëns gave his first public concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, including Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Mozart’s No. 15 (the latter with his own cadenzas). Exactly 50 years later he returned to the hall, again playing the Mozart, and now introducing his own Second Violin Sonata, with Pablo de Sarasate, and taking the solo part in his new Fifth Piano Concerto.
In the 21 years since the appearance of his Fourth Piano Concerto in 1875, much had changed in the French musical world. The giant shadow of Wagner now loomed over composers young and old, and in 1894 the premiere of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune had already signalled a new path for French music. Although Saint-Saëns admitted to admiring Wagner, he confessed at the same time to being less than an idolator and was certainly alive to the dangers the Wagnerian style posed to the traditional French virtues of clarity, polish and elegance. In his Fifth Piano Concerto, Wagner is nowhere to be heard and the work can almost be taken as a hint to Saint-Saëns’s compatriots that there were plenty of other sources of inspiration available – even if, for Saint-Saëns, the Debussyan path was not one to be recommended. On his way to the keyboard to give the premiere of his Fifth Piano Concerto, he halted, took a piece of paper out of his pocket, adjusted his pince-nez and read out a little poem of his own, looking back to the time when, as a ‘frail, delicate, sallow little boy’, he had dared to take on Beethoven and Mozart. The message: I’ve been around a long time and I know a thing or two …
•••
The concerto’s second movement, like the first, retains some traces of Classical sonata form, but the impression of its eight sections is rather of a fantasia. However, whereas the composer had made sketches for the first movement in 1894, the last two movements date entirely from his stay in Egypt during the winter of 1895 and spring of 1896. It is from this second movement that the work derives its nickname ‘Egyptian’, with the sound of croaking frogs and a Nubian love song that Saint-Saëns had heard sung by boatmen on the Nile.
Programme note © Roger Nichols
Roger Nichols is a writer, translator and critic with a particular interest in French music. His books include studies of Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen and Poulenc. From Berlioz to Boulez was published in 2022 (Kahn & Averill). In 2007 he was appointed Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur.
INTERVAL: 20 minutes
Iain Farrington (born 1977)
Extra Time (2024)
BBC commission: world premiere

Extra Time is a celebration of sport and its ability to create a rousing collective experience for its spectators. Composed during the final week of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, it quotes numerous musical themes that are associated with sports TV programmes. The piece aims to capture the various moods of attending a sports match: joy, passion, tension and humour, all combined in a jazzy musical mixture.
Programme note © Iain Farrington
Henry Mancini (1924–94)
arr. Gavin Sutherland (born 1972)
The Pink Panther – main theme (1963)
first performance of this arrangement at the Proms

A high hat. A slinky syncopation. Enter electric bass and vibraphone – dah-dah-dah-dah (freeze, freeze); dah-dah-dah-dah (freeze, freeze) – the perfect burglar motif. A sultry saxophone melody sidles by, discreet and unflappable. An anxious brass section interrupts with an outburst of countermelody, demanding answers and sowing confusion until the sax returns, cooling the temperature and tip-toeing back out.
When hearing the Pink Panther music, we perhaps think of the animated character and star of the beloved Saturday-morning cartoon, or the comic genius of Peter Sellers as the films’ bumbling Inspector Clouseau. But Henry Mancini wrote the Pink Panther theme for the charming gentleman-thief whom the Inspector chases, Sir Charles Lytton (aka The Phantom), played by David Niven. Lytton pursues a large pink diamond with a flaw in the shape of a leaping panther, and he is the suave saxophone that can never be caught. The tune we all know and love in fact belongs to the thief!
Programme note © Julie Hubbert
Julie Hubbert is a professor at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of the forthcoming Technology, Listening, and Labor: Music in New Hollywood Film (1967–1980) (OUP) and has contributed to the Oxford Handbook for Music and Advertising (OUP, 2020) and Voicing the Cinema (Univ. of California Press, 2020).
Stephen Hough (born 1961)
In His Hands – two spirituals (2024)
BBC commission: world premiere

Angel Blue soprano
Sir Stephen Hough piano
I was delighted when the BBC Proms approached me to make a couple of arrangements of spirituals for Angel Blue to sing at tonight’s Last Night. I asked her to choose two and then I put them together into one, through-composed song. The fourth verse of In His Hands is accompanied in the piano by a foreshadowing of ‘Swing low, sweet chariot’; and the short piano postlude quotes the melody of the first song.
There is no genre that compares with the African American spiritual tradition: songs growing out of the earth with heartfelt simplicity; music as direct, expressive balm for human suffering; expressing an unshakable faith in a common dignity rising above degradation and oppression.
Programme note © Stephen Hough
Ruperto Chapí (1851–1909)
Las hijas del Zebedeo (1889) –
‘Al pensar en el dueño de mis amores’ (Carceleras)

Angel Blue soprano
Zarzuela, Spanish operetta, may not often be heard on the UK’s less sunny shores, but this is a substantial genre full of sparkle, fire and irresistible melody – or in a word, oomph. Ruperto Chapí composed more than 100 of them, among which Las hijas del Zebedeo (‘The Daughters of the Zebedeo’) is considered one of his outstanding achievements. The intrigue-laden story concerns the love-lives that intertwine around a bar called the Zebedeo. ‘Al pensar en el dueño de mis amores’ is a virtuoso aria sung by Luisa, who works at a tailor’s and is in love with the Zebedeo owner’s son, Arturo.
After a sultry opening, the music takes off into a suitably dizzying gallop through the foothills of passion. The capricious Luisa, aware that plenty of other girls are after the seductive Arturo, wants him all to herself. ‘If he throws me a flower,’ she says, ‘my poor little heart bursts with love.’
Programme note © Jessica Duchen
arr. Henry Wood (1869–1944)
Fantasia on British Sea‑Songs (1905)
with additional numbers arranged by
Bob Chilcott* (born 1955) and Gareth Glyn† (born 1951)

1 The Saucy Arethusa
2 Tom Bowling –
3 Hornpipe: Jack’s the Lad
4 Londonderry Air (Danny Boy)*
5 The Skye Boat Song* (BBC Singers only)
6 Ar lan y môr (Beside the sea) †
7 See, the conqu’ring hero comes –
8 Rule, Britannia! (Thomas Arne, arr. Malcolm Sargent)
Angel Blue soprano
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (for words, see below)
Henry Wood could have been describing himself when he declared his business partner, impresario Robert Newman, was a man who ‘always had an eye on the main chance’. In 1905 they both seized the opportunity to mark the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar with a nautically themed musical extravaganza. Wood admitted he’d gone ‘the whole hog on a “sea business” programme’ for their special matinee Promenade concert on 21October, which climaxed with his newly arranged Fantasia for Orchestra on British Sea-Songs.
Wood programmed it in the Proms seasons that followed, ‘just to see how it would go’, and by the mid-1920s the Fantasia had become a Last Night fixture. It appeared just as the season finale transformed from an evening of light, shorter numbers into a set ‘ritual’, in which a serious first half was followed by an increasingly nostalgic second. One year, Wood deigned to think that Prommers had ‘had enough of it’ and left the Fantasia off the programme, but the following Monday there were ‘so many letters of protest and disappointment’ that he ‘resolved never to omit it again’.
Commemorating Nelson’s triumph over the French and Spanish navies and the Admiral’s death aboard HMSVictory, Wood’s original version of the arrangement began with a series of six meticulously researched bugle calls used to convey orders on a naval warship, including the ‘Admiral’s Salute’. The remaining parts of the Fantasia charted the course of a battle and the triumphant return home from the perspective of a British sailor.
Wood was himself a practical musician, who revised and adapted works to suit the available forces on any given occasion, so it is with no disrespect to him that the Fantasia has recently become something of a flexible compendium. It is regularly modified to include other British songs– sometimes in arrangements by hands other than Wood’s. In that spirit, we bypass the bugles and ‘The Anchor’s Weighed’, and launch straight into ‘The Saucy Arethusa’, which recounts an engagement off the coast of Brittany on 17June 1778 between HMSArethusa and the French warship Belle Poule.
It’s unlikely that Wood’s Prommers shed the now-customary mock tears when the original cellist, Jacques Renard, performed the solo in ‘Tom Bowling’, but there’s no doubting the heartache behind Charles Dibdin’s song, written in the late 1780s in memory of his brother Thomas, a captain who perished at sea.
Next, the action is back on deck, for a sailor’s hornpipe– ‘Jack’s the Lad’– and the annual reminder that ‘Old Timber’ (as Wood was affectionately known) had a mischievous sense of humour:
The younger Promenaders thoroughly enjoy their part in it. They stamp their feet in time to the hornpipe– that is until Iwhip up the orchestra in a fierce accelerando which leaves behind all those whose stamping technique is not of the very first quality. Ilike to win by two bars, if possible, but sometimes have to be content with a bar and a half.
Three national songs are inserted at this point in the proceedings to reflect the truly British nature of the Last Night. First, to Ireland, and Bob Chilcott’s arrangement of a song whose origins lie in the mists of time. The first recorded mention of what would become known as the ‘Londonderry Air’ was from the pen of Miss Jane Ross of Limervady in 1855, and it was subsequently immortalised by F. E. Weatherly’s lyrics as ‘Danny Boy’. Across the water to Scotland, and the Jacobite lament ‘The Skye Boat Song’ traces a fleeing Bonnie Prince Charlie on his way to the Isle of Skye, following his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Like ‘Danny Boy’, this Gaelic rowing song was also in fact written to words by an Englishman, Sir Harold Boulton, in the 1880s; his collaborator Annie MacLeod adapted the tune long known as ‘The Cuckoo in the Grove’. This lilting arrangement, together with the pipe-infused ‘Londonderry Air’, was specially arranged by Chilcott for the Last Night in 2005 and dedicated to the BBC Singers. This year the trio is completed by Gareth Glyn’s tender take on the traditional Welsh love song ‘Ar lan y môr’ (Beside the sea).
Wood’s sailor then makes a victorious return to the strains of George Frideric Handel’s ‘See, the conqu’ring hero comes’. Originally written for Joshua, the hit chorus became synonymous with Judas Maccabaeus after Handel inserted it into a revised version of the oratorio, which commemorated the Duke of Cumberland’s victorious homecoming from the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
Wood concluded his Fantasia with an orchestral rendition of ‘Rule, Britannia!’, from Thomas Arne’s 1740 patriotic masque Alfred. But tonight this finale is performed in the popular arrangement made by the real showman of the Last Night podium, Malcolm Sargent, whose version restored Arne’s vocal soloist and martial introduction.
Programme note © Hannah French
Hannah French is a BBC Radio 3 presenter and the author of Sir Henry Wood: Champion of J. S. Bach (Boydell & Brewer, 2019).
4 Londonderry Air (Danny Boy)
Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.
The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling,
’Tis you, ’tis you must go, and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.
’Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.
But when ye come and all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead, and dead I well may be,
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an ‘Ave’ there for me.
And I shall hear, tho’ soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be.
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.
Frederic Edward Weatherly (1848–1929)
5 The Skye Boat Song (BBC Singers only)
Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
‘Onward,’ the sailors cry!
Carry the lad that is born to be king,
Over the sea to Skye!
Loud the winds howl,
Loud the waves roar,
Thunderclaps rend the air;
Baffled our foes
Stand on the shore,
Follow they will not dare.
Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, etc.
Though the waves leap,
Soft shall ye sleep,
Ocean’s a royal bed.
Rocked in the deep,
Flora will keep
Watch by your weary head.
Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, etc.
Harold Boulton (1859–1935)
6 Ar Lan y Môr
Ar lan y môr mae rhosys cochion,
Ar lan y môr mae lilis gwynion,
Ar lan y môr mae ’nghariad inne,
Yn cysgu’r nos a chodi’r bore.
Ar lan y môr mae carreg wastad,
Lle bûm yn siarad gair â’m cariad,
Oddeutu hon mae teim yn tyfu
Ac ambell sbrigyn o rosmari.
Ar lan y môr mae cerrig gleision,
Ar lan y môr mae blodau’r meibion,
Ar lan y môr mae pob rhin wedde,
Ar lan y môr mae ’nghariad inne
Trad. Welsh
8 Rule, Britannia! (Arne, arr. Sargent)
Soprano
When Britain first at Heavn’s command
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
Choirs and audience
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.
Soprano
Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful, from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies,
Serves but to root the native oak.
Choirs and audience
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.
Soprano
The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair.
Blest Isle! With matchless beauty crown’d,
And manly hearts to guard the fair.
Choirs and audience
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.
atrrib. James Thomson (1700–48)
Edward Elgar (1857–1934)
Pomp and Circumstance
March No.1 in Dmajor
(‘Land of Hope and Glory’) (1901)

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (for words, see below)
For many years it was fashionable to regard Elgar – on the flimsy evidence of his moustachioed Edwardian looks, and a more credible record of writing stirring marches for ceremonial occasions – as the musical embodiment of the British Empire. After all, in a magazine interview of 1904 he declared, ‘I have something of the soldier in me.’ But in earlier remarks about his successful Imperial March, written in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the composer stated pragmatically, ‘I know that there are a lot of people who like to celebrate events with music. To these people I have given tunes. Is that wrong?’
In 1901 Elgar knew that he had another hit theme on his hands, confiding to his young friend Dora Penny (‘Dorabella’ of the ‘Enigma’ Variations): ‘I’ve got a tune that will knock ’em – knock ’em flat.’ The tune in question was the central trio section of the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D major, premiered with its A minor sibling (No. 2) on 19 October 1901 at the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, with the Liverpool Orchestral Society; although it was originally thought to have been conducted by the work’s dedicatee, Alfred Rodewald, recent research confirms that the composer himself was in charge of the first performance. The title comes from Shakespeare’s Othello: ‘Farewell … Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!’. Elgar’s prediction for his epic tune proved correct: at a further performance a few days after the premiere, Proms founder-conductor Henry Wood had to give an unprecedented double encore to satisfy a crowd who had ‘risen and yelled’.
Artists often talk about launching a work into the world, where it finds a life of its own. But Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 was a gift that kept on giving for Elgar: at the instigation of the contralto Clara Butt, in 1902 Elgar incorporated the trio section of the march into the final movement of his Coronation Ode, composed for the coronation of King Edward VII. The words were by A.C.Benson, a poet and master at Eton; subsequent modifications to the text at publisher Boosey’s request allowed ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ to become the standalone piece that is now an indispensable part of the Last Night of the Proms rituals.
Programme note © Graeme Kay
Choirs and audience
Land of Hope and Glory,
Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee
Who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty,
Make thee mightier yet.
Arthur Christopher Benson (1862–1925)
Hubert Parry (1848–1918),
orch. Edward Elgar
Jerusalem (1916, orch. 1922)

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (for words, see below)
Jerusalem is an extremely artful piece of composition. The text is by William Blake (1757–1827) and is contained in the preface to his epic Milton: A Poem in Two Books, written between 1804 and 1810. The music follows the words closely, the text describing a perfect musical arc through the climactic points of each verse (‘Was Jerusalem builded here?’ and ‘Till we have built Jerusalem’) then down again to the ‘dark Satanic mills’ and ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.
Ironically, the music for both verses shares a problem with ‘God Save the King’ – it ends on a falling phrase, one of the reasons why the UK national anthem is thought to be a bit pedestrian. But Parry solves this by adding a short tail-piece, or coda, that finishes on a high.
Blake’s poem lay undisturbed for much of the 19th century. In 1916 poet laureate Robert Bridges included it in an anthology, The Spirit of Man, which was intended to fortify readers’ spirits at a time when the world was facing destruction and slaughter on a wholly unprecedented scale. It therefore made perfect sense for Bridges to ask Parry to set Milton’s text to music for a meeting of Fight for Right, a nascent movement intended to boost morale among Britain’s beleaguered soldiers.
Initially reluctant because of the ultra-patriotic tone of Fight for Right’s campaign, Parry overcame his reservations, eventually telling his former student Walford Davies, its first conductor: ‘Here’s a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it.’
Jerusalem was an instant hit. In November 1916 Parry orchestrated it, and in 1922, four years after his death in 1918, Edward Elgar, who admired Parry, made the lush and luxurious orchestral arrangement that is usually heard today; Elgar’s version was premiered that year at the first Leeds Festival to take place after the war.
The conductor Malcolm Sargent introduced Jerusalem to the Last Night in the 1950s. It is now a staple, alongside ‘Rule, Britannia!’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, of the audience participation element in the Last Night festivities.
Programme note © Graeme Kay
Choirs and audience
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!
I will not cease from mental fight;
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
William Blake (1757–1827)
arr. Benjamin Britten (1913–76)
The National Anthem
(arr.1961, rev 1967)

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (verse 2 only; for words, see below)
As a piece of music, the UK National Anthem is something to be performed dutifully and respectfully. But we might be forgiven for looking a little enviously across the Channel to the rabble-rousing Marseillaise of France or the gloriously operatic Il canto degli Italiani for an anthem that really sets the pulses racing. The remarkable thing about Britten’s arrangement is that it achieves precisely this effect, through a highly daring and dramatic compositional scheme which is effectively realised in a piece which lasts less than three minutes.
Written in 1961 for the Leeds Festival, Britten’s arrangement is described by publishers Boosey & Hawkes as ‘conceived as a single crescendo, building powerfully from a simple pianissimo opening to a resounding fortissimo close’.
After a hushed opening chord and drum roll, the mostly unaccompanied chorus intones the first verse pianissimo, in varied harmonies – exactly the opposite of what one might expect to convey words that are a supplication for, and exclamation about, royal glory. Then a chain of rising orchestral scales ushers in the brass, snare drum and a substantial upward key-change as the chorus surges into verse two, the energy of both the singing and fanfares intensifying towards the twice-repeated (with added cymbal crashes) ‘God save the King’.
In all, Britten composed four works for the royal family; this National Anthem arrangement was associated with the opening in 1967 of both the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and Snape Maltings Concert Hall in Suffolk (the latter being the home of Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival).
Programme note © Graeme Kay
Choirs only
God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King!
Choirs and audience
Thy choicest gifts in store
On him be pleased to pour,
Long may he reign;
May he defend our laws
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice:
God save the King!
God save the King!
God save the King!
Trad., arr. Paul Campbell (born 1981)
Auld Lang Syne (arr.2018)

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (for words, see below)
Over 50 years before Malcolm Sargent created the Last Night we recognise today, spontaneous renditions of Auld Lang Syne began to be sung at the close of the Proms season. For Henry Wood’s Prommers, who had been entertained by a single group of orchestral musicians night after night for more than two months, this most nostalgic of songs marked a fitting way to bid farewell to their ‘auld acquaintance’.
With a three-word title that translates literally as ‘old long since’, it’s a song with roots in Scottish days of yore. Whether it originated as a ballad about a faithless lover or as a country wedding dance tune, we have Robert Burns to thank for preserving lyrics he transcribed from ‘an old man’s singing’, before adding his own verses.
Tonight we hear the song in a version prepared for the 2018 Last Night by Belfast-born composer-arranger Paul Campbell. No stranger to the BBC Proms, he has frequently collaborated with John Wilson in reconstructing MGM scores and also made arrangements of Robert Burns’s songs Ae fond kiss and My love is like a red, red rose for Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti.
Programme note © Hannah French
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o’ lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup of kindness yet
For auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup of kindness yet
For auld lang syne.
Robert Burns (1759–96)
Biographies
Sakari Oramo conductor

Sakari Oramo studied violin at theSibelius Academy, Helsinki, and the Utrecht Conservatory. After joining the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra as leader, hestudied conducting with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy (1989–92) and in 1993 was appointed the FRSO’s Associate Principal Conductor. Previously Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (1998–2008), Chief Conductor oftheFRSO (2003–12), Principal Conductor of West CoastKokkola Opera (2004–18) and Chief Conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (2008–21), he has been Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra since 2013.
In recent seasons he has conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus, NDR Elbphilharmonie, New York Philharmonic, Vienna Symphony and Boston Symphony orchestras, Staatskapelle Dresden and the Orchestra of the Academy of Santa Cecilia, Rome. Highlights of this season include his debut with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, concerts with the CBSO, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio Franc, Czech Philharmonic and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic orchestras, and a tour of Switzerland with the BBCSO. Tonight marks his fourth Proms appearance this season.
Sakari Oramo’s recordings include Nielsen’s First and Third symphonies with the RSPO, which won BBC Music Magazine’s Orchestral Award, Langgaard’s Second and Sixth symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, which won a Gramophone Award, and Busoni’s Piano Concerto with Kirill Gerstein and the BostonSymphony Orchestra, which won an International Classical Music Award.
Angel Blue soprano

Angel Blue was born in California, where she studied at UCLA and the University of Redlands and was a member of Los Angeles Opera’s Domingo–Thornton Young Artist Program.
She has sung the title-role in Tosca at the Aix-en-Provence Festival and for the Vienna Staatsoper and Royal Opera, Covent Garden; the title-role in Lulu for Scottish Opera at the Edinburgh International Festival; Bess (Porgy and Bess), Destiny/Loneliness/Greta in Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Micaëla (Carmen), Magda (La rondine) and Liù (Turandot) for the Metropolitan Opera, New York; Marguerite (Faust) for the Opéra de Paris; Violetta (La traviata) for La Scala, Milan, the Royal Opera and Metropolitan Opera; the title-role in Aida for the Royal Opera; and Leonora (Il trovatore) in San Francisco. La bohème has featured significantly in her career: she sang Musetta in Los Angeles and at La Scala; and Mimì for English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as for the Vienna Staatsoper and in Dresden, Hamburg, Toronto and Valencia.
She is a prolific concert and recital artist and has appeared in over 40 countries. Always keen to champion young singers, during the Covid-19 lockdown she presented Faithful Friday, an online talk show in which she interviewed figures who inspired her, with the aim of motivating opera students to continue and complete their studies. Her accolades include two Grammy Awards, the 2020 Beverly Sills Award and the 2022 Richard Tucker Foundation Award.
Sir Stephen Hough piano

Named by The Economist as one of 20 Living Polymaths, Sir Stephen Hough combines a distinguished career as a pianist with those of composer and writer. He was the first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, was appointed CBE in 2014 and knighted in 2022.
This season he has performed in over 80 concerts across four continents. Concerto highlights include engagements with the Bergen, Nagoya, Oslo and Seoul Philharmonic orchestras; BBC Scottish, Düsseldorf and Seattle Symphony orchestras; and the Minnesota Orchestra.
His song-cycle Songs of Love and Loss– co-commissioned by the Wigmore Hall, 92nd Street Y in New York and Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana– received its world premiere in January last year. This year saw the world and European premieres of his Piano Concerto, ‘The World of Yesterday’, in which he appeared as soloist with the Utah Symphony and the Hallé respectively.
Also an author, his memoir Enough: Scenes from Childhood, was published last year. This followed his collection of essays Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More (2019)– a 2020 Royal Philharmonic Society Award winner and a Financial Times Book of the Year 2019 – as well as his first novel, The Final Retreat (2018)
Sir Stephen Hough is an Honorary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, the International Chair of Piano Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester (of which he was made a Companion in 2019) and serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School in New York.
BBC Symphony Orchestra
For over 90 years the BBC Symphony Orchestra has been a driving force on the British musical landscape, championing contemporary music and giving voice to rarely performed and neglected composers. It plays a key role in the BBC Proms, performing regularly throughout each season, including the First and LastNights.
Highlights of this Proms season include the First Night with pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason conducted by Elim Chan and the Last Night under Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo; a celebration of singer-songwriter Nick Drake conducted by Creative Artist in Association Jules Buckley; Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder (with mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton) and Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony under Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska.
The BBC SO is Associate Orchestra at the Barbican, where it presents a distinctive season of concerts with highlights of the coming season including symphonies by Mahler, the UK premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Hush and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with the BBC Symphony Chorus in memory of the orchestra’s late Conductor Laureate Andrew Davis, all with Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo. The BBC SO makes appearances across the UK and internationally, and gives free concerts at its Maida Vale studios. The majority of performances are broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and available on BBC Sounds.
The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus – alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Singers and BBC Proms– offer innovative education and community activities. Together they play a lead role in the BBC Ten Pieces and BBC Young Composer programmes, including work with schools, young people and families in East London ahead of the BBC SO’s move to its new home in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford.
Chief Conductor
Sakari Oramo
Principal Guest Conductor
Dalia Stasevska
Günter Wand Conducting Chair
Semyon Bychkov
Creative Artist in Association
Jules Buckley
First Violins
Stephen Bryant leader
Philip Brett
Jeremy Martin
Jenny King
Celia Waterhouse
Colin Huber
Shirley Turner
Ni Do
Molly Cockburn
Stuart McDonald
Naoko Keatley
Liu-Yi Rettallick
David Chadwick
Charlotte Reid
Ruth Schulten
Gaia Ramsdell
Second Violins
Heather Hohmann
Dawn Beazley
Rose Hinton
Nihat Agdach
Rachel Samuel
Danny Fajardo
Lucy Curnow
Tammy Se
Caroline Cooper
Victoria Hodgson
Iona McDonald
Peter Graham
Non Peters
Nicola Goldschieder
Violas
Richard Waters
Philip Hall
Michael Leaver
Carolyn Scott
Mary Whittle
Peter Mallinson
Linda Kidwell
Lowri Thomas
Mark Gibbs
Anna Bastow
Anna Barsegana
James Flannery
Cellos
Richard Harwood
Graham Bradshaw
Mark Sheridan
Clare Hinton
Michael Atkinson
Morwenna Del Mar
Jane Lindsay
Ghislaine McMullin
Alba Merchant
Anna Beryl
Double Basses
Nicholas Bayley
Gareth Sheppard
Anita Langridge
Michael Clarke
Beverley Jones
Simon Oliver
Nathan Knight
Lewis Reid
Flutes
Daniel Pailthorpe
Tomoka Mukai
Piccolo
Kathleen Stevenson
Nicholas Bricht
Oboes
Tom Blomfield
Imogen Smith
Cor Anglais
Emily Cockbill
Clarinets
Richard Hosford
Jonathan Parkin
Bass Clarinet
Thomas Lessels
Bassoons
Guylaine Eckersley
Graham Hobbs
Contrabassoon
Steven Magee
Horns
Nicholas Korth
Michael Murray
Eleanor Blakeney
Nicholas Hougham
Alexei Watkins
Phillippa Koushk-Jalili
Mark Wood
Trumpets
Philip Cobb
Joseph Atkins
Martin Hurrell
Niall Keatley
Rebecca Crawshaw
Trombones
Helen Vollam
Dan Jenkins
Gemma Riley
Bass Trombone
Robert O’Neill
Euphonuim
Becky Smith
Tuba
Sam Elliott
Timpani
Antoine Bedewi
Percussion
David Hockings
Alex Neal
Fiona Ritchie
Joseph Cooper
Owen Gunnell
Joe Richards
Harps
Elizabeth Bass
Anneke Hodnett
Drum Kit
Mike Smith
Guitar
James Woodrow
Organ
Richard Pearce
The list of players was correct at the time of being published
Director Bill Chandler
Head of Artistic Planning Emma Gait
Orchestra Manager Susanna Simmons
Orchestra Personnel Manager Murray Richmond
Concerts Manager Marelle McCallum
Tours Manager Kathryn Aldersea
Music Libraries Manager Mark Millidge
Orchestral Librarian Julia Simpson
Planning Co-ordinator Nadim Jauffur
Chorus Manager Brodie Smith
Chief Producer Ann McKay
Assistant Producer Ben Warren
Senior Stage Manager Rupert Casey
Stage Manager Michael Officer
Commercial, Rights and Business Affairs Executive Geraint Heap
Business Accountant Nimisha Ladwa
BBC London Orchestras Marketing and Learning Head of Marketing, Publications and Learning Kate Finch
Communications Manager Jo Hawkins
Publicist Freya Edgeworth
Marketing Manager Sarah Hirons
Marketing Executives Jenny Barrett, Alice White
Senior Learning Manager Lauren Creed
Learning Producers Melanie Fryer, Laura Mitchell, Chloe Shrimpton
Assistant Learning Producers Siân Bateman, Cat Cayley, Deborah Fether
Learning Business Co-ordinator Charley Douglas
Learning Trainees Shah Hussain, Nairobi Nomura
BBC Symphony Chorus
Founded in 1928, the BBC Symphony Chorus is one of the UK’s leading choirs. It performs, records and broadcasts a distinctive range of large-scale choral music with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and internationally acclaimed conductors and soloists.
The chorus’s early performances included Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, Stravinsky’s Persephone and Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast and, under Chorus Director Neil Ferris, this commitment to contemporary music remains at the heart of its performances today.
The BBC Symphony Chorus makes regular appearances at the BBC Proms, with performances this summer including the First and Last Nights, Fauré’s Requiem with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Stéphane Denève and Holst’s The Cloud Messenger with the BBC SO under its Chief Conductor, Sakari Oramo. Highlights with the BBCSO at the Barbican next season include Haydn’s ‘Nelson’ Mass under Hannu Lintu and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius under Oramo, a performance dedicated to the chorus’s late President, Andrew Davis.
Most of the chorus’s performances are broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and it has also made a number of commercial recordings, including a Grammy-nominated release of Holst’s First Choral Symphony and a Gramophone Award-winning disc of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius conducted by Davis.
Recent releases include premiere recordings of Vaughan Williams’s The Future and The Steersman conducted by Martin Yates and Tippett’s A Child of Our Time conductedby Davis.
Director
Neil Ferris
Deputy Director
Grace Rossiter
Accompanist
Michael Higgins
Vocal Coach
Katie Thomas
First Sopranos
Anne Bailey
Karen Benny
Elizabeth Bird
Asia Bonuccelli
Lydia Burling-Smith
Katharine Chadd
Tanya Cutts
Rebecca Daltry
Josceline Dunne
Rebecca Eckley
Christine Evans
Isabella Farrell
Lizzie Howard
Jacqueline Hunt
Mackenzie Kavanagh
Sarah Mainwaring
Bridget McNulty
Francesca Mosely
Ellie Parker
Francesca Richards
Rebecca Rimmington
Nicola Robinson
Maxine Shearer
Nathalie Slim
Imogen Vinning
Rachel Wilson
Second Sopranos
Katherine Allenby
Georgia Cannon
Kate Chudakova
Louise Clegg
Jenna Clemence
Sofia Correia Bagulho
Erin Cowburn
Natalie Dalcher
Stella Guardi
Isobel Hammond
Bev Howard
Karan Humphries
Helen Jeffries
Margaret Jones
Rei Kozaki
Ramani Langley
Christine Leslie
Arielle Loewinger
Louisa Martin
Katie Masters
Olivia Middleton
Julia Neate
Claire Parry
Hanna Sauvignon-Smythe
Madelon Shaw
Roseanna Skikun
Elizabeth Ullstein
Sheila Wood
First Altos
Sarah Barr
Hannah Bishay
Sophie Bishton
Rachael Curtis
Sue Daniels
Kate Hampshire
Mary Hardy
Jane Heath
Teresa Howard
Ruth James
Tomoko Kigaku
Ruth Marshall
Charlotte Senior
Hilary Sillis
Elisabeth Storey
Charlotte Tomlinson
Second Altos
Stella Baylis
Helen Brice
Theresa Browne
Joanna Dacombe
Daniella Downs
Rosie Hopkins
Kirsten Johnson
Anja Rekeszuz
Mary Simmonds
Jayne Swindin
Joanna Thompson
Helen Tierney
First Tenors
Christopher Ashton
David Halstead
Stephen Horsman
Thomas Le Brocq
Jim Nelhams
Pano Ntourntoufis
Bill Richards
Greg Satchell
Jake Watson
David Willcock
Second Tenors
Jefferson Feerick
Sam Lyons
Simon Naylor
Philip Rayner
Fionn Robertson
Richard Salmon
Jonathan Williams
First Basses
Mike Abrahms
David Allenby
James Barker
Tim Bird
Paul Bodiam
Vicente Chavarria
Tony de Rivaz
David England
Quentin Evans
Tom Fullwood
Mark Graver
Richard Green
Alan Hardwick
Michel Harman
Alan Jones
Peter Kellett
Robert Little
Amon Paran
Duncan Thompson
Second Basses
Malcolm Aldridge
Sam Brown
Jonathan Forrest
Alex Hardy
Kevin Hollands
Andrew Lay
Edgar Marquez
Michael Martin
Tim Miles
Andrew Money
Nigel Montagu
Andrew Parkin
Mark Parrett
Simon Potter
Richard Steedman
Joshua Taylor
Neil Thompson
Tristan Weymes
Robin Wicks
The list of singers was correct at the time of being published
BBC Singers
Formed in 1924 and based at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios, the BBC Singers records music for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 alongside work for other network radio, television and commercial release. It also presents an annual series of concerts at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s Milton Court Concert Hall; gives free concerts in London; appears at major festivals in the UK and abroad; regularly performs with many of the world’s leading composers,conductors and soloists; and appears annually at the BBC Proms, including celebrated performances at the First and Last Nights. The choir promotes a 50:50 gender policy for composers whose music it performs, and champions composers from all backgrounds: recent concerts and recordings have included music by Soumik Datta, Joanna Marsh, Reena Esmail, Sun Keting and Roderick Williams, and recent collaborations have featured Laura Mvula, Clare Teal and the South Asian dance company Akademi. It recently joined voices from the popular children’s programme Hey Duggee to release a Christmas single, and last year appeared in the show’s The Choir Badge episode. As part the BBC’s plan to open its new BBC Music Studios at East Bank in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, the choir works closely with the local community through a programme of music education, outreach events and live performances. In March this year the BBC Singers received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Ensemble Award.
Chief Conductor
Sofi Jeannin
Principal Guest Conductors
Bob Chilcott
Owain Park
Associate Conductor, Learning
Nicholas Chalmers
Artist in Residence
Eric Whitacre
Associate Composer
Roderick Williams
Artists in Association
Anna Lapwood, Abel Selaocoe
Sopranos
Zoë Brookshaw
Alice Gribbin
Rebecca Lea
Helen Neeves
Olivia Robinson
Altos
Nancy Cole
Ciara Hendrick
Jessica Gillingwater
Katherine Nicholson
Tenors
Benjamin Durrant
Samuel Jenkins
James Robinson
Tom Raskin
Basses
Timothy Dickinson
Charles Gibbs
Jamie W. Hall
Edward Price
Andrew Rupp
The list of singers was correct at the time of being published
Director Jonathan Manners
Assistant Choral Manager Eve Machin
Acting Producer Charlotte Parr
Team Assistant Ellie Sperling
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