Â鶹ԼÅÄ Proms 2008
New music
Update – 17 July 2008: this page has been updated to reflect changes to the details of some of the events.
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The Â鶹ԼÅÄ Proms has a long tradition of introducing new music to audiences through both its own commissions and premieres, and 2008 is no exception.
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This year the Proms presents 11 Â鶹ԼÅÄ commissions and eight UK premieres – a total of 20 premieres from today's living composers.
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Further opportunities to get inside the music are on offer with the chance to hear the composers talk about their work in four Composer Portraits as part of Proms Plus at the Royal College of Music.
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Â鶹ԼÅÄ commissions
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Chen Yi – Olympic Fire (8 August, Prom 29)
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Chen Yi was born in Ghanzhou in 1953: she was the first woman to receive a Master's degree in composition in
China in 1986, is renowned for her ability to combine Chinese and Western traditions transcending cultural and musical boundaries, and serves as an ambassador for the arts.
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Chen Yi's Olympic Fire receives its world premiere on the day of the opening of the Beijing Olympics, 8 August. Her new piece celebrates the Olympic spirit but is not specifically connected to the Beijing games; rather it looks forwards to 2012 in London.
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Chen says: "It evokes the image of fire, not just as a physical power but as a spiritual power. I also want to embody the idea of different cultures meeting and conforming."
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Olympic Fire is performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Leonard Slatkin. The conductor and composer discuss both Olympic Fire and wider Chinese cultural issues with Radio 3's Sara Mohr-Pietsch before the concert.
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Kenneth Hesketh – Graven Image (1 August, Prom 19)
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Kenneth Hesketh is a composer whose music is much in demand both in the UK and abroad – he is Professor of Composition and Orchestration at the Royal College of Music, Composer-in-the-House for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – and his champions include Oliver Knussen and Susanna Mälkki.
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Hear him discuss his new work with the RLPO'S Executive Director Andrew Cornall and conductor Vasily Petrenko directly before the performance.
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Graven Image is a Â鶹ԼÅÄ co-commission with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, which performs the world premiere on 1 August, under the baton of Vasily Petrenko, making his Proms debut.
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It is a memorial prompted partly by the death of a friend's son but also reflects Hesketh's concern for the borderline between the living and the mechanical.
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"It begins in a regular, mechanical way, like a series of clockwork escapements, then it becomes infected with irregularity but in a new way."
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Simon Holt – Troubled Light (25 July, Prom 11)
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The Â鶹ԼÅÄ Proms celebrates the 50th birthday in 2008 of Simon Holt with the world premiere of Troubled Light, on
25 July, performed by the Â鶹ԼÅÄ National Orchestra of Wales and conducted by Thierry Fischer.
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Troubled Light consists of five movements, each of which depicts a different colour. Holt is fascinated by colours and how artists have used them; the title refers to Goethe's description of colour.
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The first movement's title, Fell Of Dark, comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins; the second movement, Rudhira, is a "two-minute flash of red"; Ellsworth begins with a high-shimmering acid-yellow chord, inspired by an Ellsworth Kelly painting; then comes a moonstruck movement based on a line from Lorca; and finally Mehr Licht, which takes its title from Goethe's dying plea – "more light" (Prom 59).
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Recently appointed Composer-in-Association at the Â鶹ԼÅÄ National Orchestra of Wales, Simon Holt can be heard in conversation with Radio 3's Sarah Walker discussing his new work and presenting some of
his chamber music in a Proms Composer Portrait.
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Stuart MacRae – Gaudete (10 August, Prom 33)
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Scottish composer Stuart MacRae's works are often inspired by aspects of the natural landscape and Gaudete is a prime example of this. It is based on a collection of poems by Ted Hughes, a writer who was similarly fascinated with nature.
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MacRae states that he "loves the way Hughes gives us brilliant sharp images of something unfathomable. I've chosen a group of poems from the collection Epilogue that creates a 'life narrative' from birth to death."
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Gaudete is scored for soprano and orchestra and is performed by Susanna Andersson and the Â鶹ԼÅÄ SO conducted by Edward Gardner. At 5.45pm at
the RCM Edward Gardner talks to Stuart MacRae and
Michael Berkeley about their works, hosted by Ivan Hewett.
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Anna Meredith – New Work (13 September, Prom 76)
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This is the first commission for the Last Night Of The Proms since 2003, and, breaking new ground, it will involve not only performers in the Royal Albert Hall but, by the miracle of technology, performers from the four Proms In The Park concerts as well.
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Gwilym Simcock – Progressions (9 August, Prom 31)
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Gwilym Simcock is breaking new ground with his ability to transcend genres, switching effortlessly between jazz and classical music. The first jazz musician to become a Radio 3 New Generation Artist, 27-year-old Gwilym has been dubbed a "creative genius" by none other than Chick Corea.
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Progressions has been written for his trio – drummer Martin France and bass player Phil Donkin – and the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Concert Orchestra, which premieres the work on 9 August, with Charles Hazlewood.
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It is intended to bridge the gap between the traditional orchestral format and the contemporary improvisation of a piano trio. He says: "I want the listener to be unable to tell where the written-out part ends and the improvisation begins."
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Karlheinz Stockhausen – Harmonien (2 August, Prom 20)
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Karlheinz Stockhausen's unexpected death in December sadly means that the Proms will be honouring his work posthumously, but it has been possible to programme a world premiere.
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Klang was his final work, a projected cycle of 24 pieces, one for each hour of the day. Harmonien, the fifth hour of Klang, was written for Marco Blaauw.
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Since 1998, Marco Blaauw worked intensely with Stockhausen and premiered solo roles in scenes of his operatic cycle Licht.
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The Â鶹ԼÅÄ has commissioned Harmonien for trumpet and the world premiere is part of Stockhausen Day.
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Steven Stucky – Rhapsodies (28 August, Prom 57)
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Rhapsodies is a co-commission by the Â鶹ԼÅÄ and the New York Philharmonic, which performs this new work with Lorin Maazel at the Proms on 28 August.
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Stucky says that he "wanted to create something that's at maximum heat for
the whole of its length. It's a continuously evolving single movement on the Sibelius model. It burns itself out in a series of waves, each starting out in one instrumental group and spreading out to the whole orchestra like a virus."
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In a Proms Composer Portrait Steven Stucky talks to Andrew McGregor about Rhapsodies and also introduces some of his chamber works at 5.45pm at the RCM.
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Huw Watkins – Sad Steps (8 September, PCM 8)
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Welsh pianist and composer Huw Watkins has written an extraordinarily large number of works, considering he is still only in his early 30s; many of them are for chamber ensemble, including the Nash Ensemble, Belcea Quartet and the Peterson Ensemble.
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Sad Steps has been written for Â鶹ԼÅÄ New Generation Artists the Aronowitz Ensemble, who will premiere the work as part of the Proms Chamber Music series at Cadogan Hall.
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The title is a phrase from a poem in Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings and the work is scored for an unusual combination of six string instruments and piano, with the piano set against the strings rather than
woven in with them.
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Jason Yarde – Porgy & Bess
(9 August, Prom 31)
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Jason Yarde is a composer, arranger, producer, musical director and alto saxophonist who composes across a range of styles.
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Along with Charles Hazlewood, the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Concert Orchestra and the producer DaVinChe, he created the ground-breaking Urban Classics project which married orchestral sound, jazz idioms and the specifically British urban music known as grime.
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His new work, he says, will grow out of that experience, but with a new element added to the mix: "I love the way Gershwin spans the pop and orchestral worlds, and I really wanted to create something that would pay homage to that."
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World premieres
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Michael Berkeley – Slow Dawn (9 August, Prom 33)
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To celebrate Michael Berkeley's 60th birthday the Â鶹ԼÅÄ SO and Edward Gardner perform the world premiere of the new version of his Slow Dawn.
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It is a work that draws on many dawns seen from the window of the composer's Welsh country house. "I love the way the light changes from total blackness to day, with many intermediate stages," says Berkeley.
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Jonathan Harvey – Speakings (19 August, Prom 45)
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Harvey's new work for orchestra and live electronics is the final instalment of a trilogy written as Composer-in-Association of the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Scottish Symphony Orchestra, which performs its world premiere with its Chief Conductor Ilan Volkov.
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The Buddhist notions of purity in body and mind were the topics of the first two; now comes speech. The composer says: "I've been fascinated by the connection between speech and music for years." This work treats the orchestral sound electronically, using powerful new speech-synthesis software developed at IRCAM.
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The spectacular result is the sound of instruments magically blended together with vowels and consonants, as if the orchestra is learning to speak. Underlying the piece is the ancient thought that there is a pure speech beyond language. Hear Jonathan Harvey talk about Speakings and the electronic revolution with Andrew McGregor, 5.45pm, RCM.
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European premiere
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Mark-Anthony Turnage – Chicago Remains (8 September, Prom 71)
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Chicago Remains was inspired by a riverboat trip Turnage took when exploring Chicago, during which he was struck by the city's architectural beauty.
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A co-commission written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, the score is inscribed to the memory of Sir John Drummond, former Director of the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Proms (1986–95), and a dedicated champion of new music.
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Chicago Remains juxtaposes the image of modern-day Chicago with the memory of the fire of 1871 that devastated three-and-half square miles of the city, destroying more than 18,000 buildings and killing 300 people.
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Further inspiration for the work came from poet Carl Sandburg, who wrote of the "tough grandeur" of the city, which is reflected in the structure of the work – one large paragraph of vividly etched incidents that unfold and highlight the "smoke and steel" Sandburg describes in his ode to industrialism.
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The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performs the European premiere under the baton of Bernard Haitink. In the final Proms Composer Portrait of the season, Mark-Anthony Turnage talks to Andrew McGregor about Chicago Remains and introduces performances of his chamber music at 5.45pm at the RCM.
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UK premieres
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Elliott Carter – Caténaires (18 July, Prom 1)
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Written for Pierre-Laurent Aimard at his request in 1998, Caténaires emerged from an obsession Carter had to write "a fast one-line piece with no chords. It became a continuous chain of notes using different spacings, accents and colourings to produce a wide variety of expression".
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The title refers to a "catenary", which is the shape a cable makes when it hangs between two supports. The UK premiere of this four-minute virtuoso showpiece is given on the first night of the 2008 Proms by Aimard himself, in celebration of Carter's centenary.
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Mark-Anthony Turnage - The Torini Scale (27 July, Prom 13)
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The Torino Scale takes its title from the way of measuring the hazard posed to our planet by near-Earth objects such as asteroids, so it couldn't be more fitting than for it to receive
its UK premiere as part of the Doctor Who Prom, on Sunday 27 July.
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Mark-Anthony Turnage first became interested in mysterious objects when he was asked to contribute a new movement to Sir Simon Rattle's recording of Holst's The Planets. Composing Ceres, named after the largest of the asteroids, sparked off a fascination for what Turnage calls "the doomsday aspect of asteroids, which could destroy Earth one day".
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Since then he's written Juno and now The Torino Scale, both premiered by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and Jonathan Nott. The material takes its cue from the musical connotations of the title, and Turnage describes the piece as "only little, but a bit wild".
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Soundings (18 August, Prom 44)
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Soundings celebrates the conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim and was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2005. The work embraces the artist in both these roles. It presents a myriad of different "soundings with humour".
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The piece moves rapidly through orchestral ideas and instrument combinations culminating in a teasing interplay with the piano at its climax. The UK premiere is given by the Â鶹ԼÅÄ SSO and the dual pianist/conductor role is split between pianist Nicolas Hodges and conductor Ilan Volkov.
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Peter Eötvös – Seven (27 August, Prom 55)
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Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös had for a long time been thinking of writing a violin concerto and was inspired to do so following the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003 that took seven lives. The work is a very personal monologue and musical expression of the composer's sympathy towards the astronauts who lost their lives.
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"This is not a traditional concerto that sets up a contest or contrast between the soloist and orchestra. It's a memorial piece, like Berg's Violin Concerto, and the orchestra's role is to create a sense of the vast space. It's as if the violin is travelling through this space as it sings."
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The number seven plays a key role throughout the work – seven astronauts each receive a personal dedication cadence, seven determines the musical and rhythmic structure of the work, with 49 musicians divided into seven groups, plus the soloist and a further six violinists dotted around the auditorium, who represent "seven satellites or souls sounding and hovering in space".
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Seven receives its UK premiere on 27 August from the violinist who premiered the work in 2007, Akiko Suwanai. The Philharmonia is conducted by Eötvös himself.
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Anders Hillborg – Clarinet Concerto (Peacock Tales) (13 August, Prom 37)
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Swedish composer Anders Hillborg was inspired to write a clarinet concerto for his fellow Swede Martin Fröst (a former Radio 3 New Generation Artist) as "he loves the virtuosity of a great soloist like Martin. It gives us musical experiences that cannot be created in any other way."
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Fröst gives the UK premiere on 13 August with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and its recently appointed Music Director, Gustavo Dudamel. In a Proms Composer Portrait Anders Hillborg talks about Peacock Tales with Radio 3's
Fiona Talkington and introduces some of his chamber music at 5.45pm at the RCM.
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Magnus Lindberg – Seht die Sonne (August 30, Prom 59)
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Magnus Lindberg's Seht die Sonne was described as "sharp as a knife ... a tour de force" in Der Tagespiegel following its world premiere by the Berliner Philharmoniker last October.
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It was written as a counterpart to Mahler's Ninth Symphony and further references include the final chorus of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, which inspired the work's title.
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The UK premiere is given by Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra.
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Karlheinz Stockhausen – Cosmic Pulses (2 August, Prom 20)
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After completing the last of the seven operas which make up his operatic cycle Licht, Stockhausen embarked on another grandiose project, Klang, which was to have comprised a set of 24 pieces, one for each hour of the day. The electronic Cosmic Pulses is the 13th work in the cycle, and it was premiered at Sala Sinopoli in the Parco della Musica in Rome in May last year.
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The piece lasts 38 minutes and is made up of 24 different layers of sound. Stockhausen explained its structure as follows: "The loops are successively layered on top of each other from low to high and from the slowest to the fastest, and end one after the other in the same order.
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"They are enlivened by manual regulation of the accelerandos and ritardandos around the respective tempos, and by quite narrow glissandos upwards and downwards around the original melodies."
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Sir John Tavener – Cantus Mysticus (27 August, Prom 56)
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Cantus Mysticus is a seven-minute work scored for solo clarinet, soprano and string orchestra (violins and cellos only). It sets a text by Goethe concerned with the "Eternal Feminine", which, the composer says, "according to esoteric metaphysics reveals the 'child of the soul' and thus God".
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The music rises in pitch and intensity, with echoes of birdsong in the dialogue between voice and clarinet. At the climax the clarinet bursts into a wild improvisation, representing the principal "divine play".
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Cantus Mysticus receives its UK premiere by the London Sinfonietta in celebration of the ensemble's 40th anniversary (alongside Tavener's The Whale). The London Sinfonietta is joined by clarinettist Mark van de Wiel and soprano Patricia Rozario and conducted by David Atherton, its co-founder.
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Other premieres
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Arnold Bax – In Memoriam Patrick Pearse
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First public performance
Prom 10, Thursday 24 July
Â鶹ԼÅÄ Philharmonic/Yan Pascal Tortelier
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Chris Hazell
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Folk-song medley
Â鶹ԼÅÄ commission: world premiere
Prom 76, Saturday 13 September
Bryn Terfel; Â鶹ԼÅÄ SO/Sir Roger Norrington
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Schubert Orchestrations
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Ständchen, D920b (orch. David Matthews)
Bei dir Allein, D866/2 (orch. Manfred Trojahn)
Nacht und Träume, D827 (orch. Colin Matthews)
Das Lied im Grünen, D917 (orch. Detlev Glanert)
Prom 48, Friday 22 August
Angelika Kirchschlager (mezzo-soprano); Apollo Voices (women's voices); Gürzenich Orchestra/Markus Stenz
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Kathryn Tickell – Folk-Song Arrangement, Confluence
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Â鶹ԼÅÄ commission: world premiere
Prom 4, Sunday 20 July
Bella Hardy (singer); London Young Musicians; Folkestra; Muzsikás; London Sinfonietta/Martyn Brabbins
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Arr. Jason Yarde – Gershwin, Porgy And Bess: "My Man's Gone Now"
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Â鶹ԼÅÄ commission; world premiere
Prom 31, Saturday 9 August
Gwilym Simcock (piano); Phil Donkin (double bass); Martin France (drums); Â鶹ԼÅÄ Concert Orchestra/Charles Hazlewood
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