Read on you find out all you need to know about the BBC Proms concert (Prom 32) taking place today, Monday 12 August, at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Sir Karl Jenkins, Beethoven, Jess Gillam… there are plenty of treats in store.
Need to know more about the this year’s Proms? The head over to our packed 2024 BBC Proms guide, where you will find all the essential info on all the 2024 Proms. These aren’t limited to London, by the way: there are also weekend Proms festivals in Gateshead, Nottingham, and Bristol, plus chamber music concerts in Newport, Belfast and Aberdeen.
What’s on at the BBC Proms today?
Today’s Prom (Prom 32) opens with the Concert Overture by the Welsh composer Grace Williams (1906-77). Probably Wales’s greatest female composer to date, Williams was also the first British woman to score a feature film (1949’s Blue Scar). Her other popular works include a Violin Concerto (1950), a Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra (1941), and Penillion, written for the National Youth Orchestra of Wales in 1955.
After that we will hear Stravaganza, a BBC commission by Sir Karl Jenkins. Composed in 2019 and deriving from the Italian word for ‘eccentric’, it’s a four-movement work for saxophone and orchestra. Tonight’s soloist, and the work’s dedicatee, is the captivating saxophonist and BBC Radio 3 presenter Jess Gillam.
As Sir Karl explains, the concerto is inspired by the fact that Gillam initially learned the saxophone in a carnival, having first tried the stilts and then the drums. ‘The work is in four movements, and a certain eccentricity or quirkiness pervades throughout,’ Jenkins explains. ‘In many ways it is programmatic but the listener may create her or his eccentric fantasies.’
Did you know? Jess Gillam was a finalist at the 2016 BBC Young Musician of the Year. Her fellow finalists in what was something of a bumper year were the horn player Ben Goldscheider and cellist (and eventual winner) Sheku Kanneh-Mason.
Next on the programme is the Overture No. 1 by the supremely talented and, let’s say it, somewhat underrated French composer Louise Farrenc. From the era of Schumann and following that of Beethoven, Farrenc’s music bears certain similarities to these composers, but she also has a soundworld all her own. She’s a very worthy entry in our list of the greatest French composers of all time.
Talking of Beethoven, we finish tonight with his masterful, joyous, and rhythmically charged Seventh Symphony. This is Beethoven at his most vigorous, spontaneous and effervescent. Composer and author Antony Hopkins noted that ‘the notes seem to fly off the page as we are borne along on a floodtide of inspired invention’, while Richard Wagner, impressed by the Seventh’s lively rhythms, called it the ‘apotheosis of the dance.’
Who is performing at tonight’s Prom?
As we mentioned, the soloist for Karl Jenkins’s Stravaganza is saxophonist Jess Gillam. Accompanying Jess, and performing tonight’s other works, will be the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Nil Venditti.
Is today’s BBC Prom on TV?
No, although many of the Proms are on TV: check our guide to all the televised 2024 BBC Proms for updates. But you can, of course, hear tonight’s Prom (and all Proms) on BBC Radio 3.
What time does tonight’s Prom start?
Prom 32 begins at 7.30pm.
And how much are tickets for the BBC Proms today?
Tickets for Prom 32 are priced between £11 and £54. Or, there’s always the option of becoming a Prommer for the day, and joining the line of classical-hungry audiences queuing for the chance of an £8 ticket to today’s Prom.