Packed with wit, style and memorable melodies, Bernstein’s eclectic score for the comic operetta Candide belies its troubled genesis. It was playwright Lillian Hellman who in 1953 suggested Voltaire’s satire to Bernstein, and the following year, with lyricist John Latouche on board, work began on what the composer would call his ‘Valentine card to European music’. From the outset it was a challenge. ‘Candide crawls along: it’s the hardest thing I ever tried,’ wrote Bernstein in July 1954 and, as time went on, little improved. Latouche left the project, Bernstein and Hellman floundered over lyricists, directors declined to be involved and in letters to friends Bernstein acknowledged the project’s ‘multitudinous’ problems and his desire not ‘to waste another year’ on it. Following out-of-town try-outs in Boston, the show eventually opened on Broadway in a production directed by Tyrone Guthrie on 1 December 1956. Bernstein’s music was critically praised but that wasn’t enough: Candide ran for only 73 performances. Still, far from allowing it to vanish for ever, Bernstein returned to it, reworking it time and again during his lifetime with numerous different versions bearing testament to its complicated history.

While the fortunes of Candide have fluctuated in the theatre, its overture has become a much-loved staple of the concert hall ever since Bernstein first conducted it in an expanded orchestration with the New York Philharmonic on 26 January 1957. With this thrilling and compact tour de force combining music from a handful of numbers with new material, Bernstein hoped to give an idea of the ‘fun and frolic’ of the show.

•••

Opening with a fanfare drawn from the number ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds’, it speeds through the virtuoso flurries of ‘Battle Music’ before allowing the soaring melody of the show’s marriage duet ‘Oh, Happy We’ to come to the fore. After a nod to the showstopper ‘Glitter and Be Gay’, everything comes together as the overture hurtles to an exhilarating conclusion.

^{Programme note © Sophie Redfern
Sophie Redfern is a Visiting Fellow at King’s College London and lectures on 20th-century music at the University of Nottingham. A specialist in American music and dance, she is the author of the award-winning Bernstein and Robbins: The Early Ballets (Univ. of Rochester Press, 2021).}

While John Foulds’s most exploratory work was largely ignored during his lifetime, he did manage to score two big popular hits: the ‘Keltic Lament’, originally the middle movement of the three-part Keltic Suite (1911), and the monumental A World Requiem (1919–21), performed annually on Armistice Night from 1923 to 1926. Interest in things ‘Keltic’ or ‘Celtic’ (the two spellings were for a while interchangeable) had expanded widely in this country during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This partly reflected the growth of nationalism in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, but it also indicated a desire for a more inclusive sense of Britishness in the Anglo-Saxon countries, whose cultural and historical models up till then had tended to be more narrowly English. 

When it came to Celtic folk music, Foulds was no sentimental dabbler. He investigated it as seriously as he did the richly varied music of India, and in later works, like the concerto for wordless voice and orchestra Lyra celtica (1917–25), the depth and sympathy of his engagement resulted in music of remarkable originality and unique, haunting atmosphere. 

The Keltic Suite was Foulds’s first attempt to explore Celtic-ness in his own music, and while it’s much simpler in style and structure than Lyra celtica, it’s still a sincere homage to a culture Foulds was clearly enjoying discovering for himself. The main melody, sung out by solo cello above ‘bardic’ strummed chords on harp, is gorgeous, and it expands warmly when taken up by full strings, before violins bring the music to a peaceful close. 

^{Programme note © Stephen Johnson
Stephen Johnson is the author of books on Bruckner, Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich, and a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine. For 14 years he was a presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music. He now works both as a freelance writer and as a composer.}

Nicky Spencetenor
BBC Singers (upper voices) (bass soloist: Jimmy Holliday)
BBC Symphony Chorus (upper voices)

The water-nymph Rusalka has fallen in love with the (human) Prince who comes to swim in her forest pool, and begs the witch Ježibaba to make her mortal. But the spell comes at a cost: Rusalka must give up her voice in return, never able to declare her love. And if the Prince fails to return her silent feelings, he will die and she herself will be eternally damned. 

Premiered in 1901, just three years before the composer’s death, Dvořák’s opera Rusalka blends earth and moonlight – Czech folk-dances and melodies, and silvery, gossamer orchestration – to create a heart-breaking musical fairy tale that’s a first cousin to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. 

You can hear the water lapping softly in woodwind and harp around the edges of the Prince’s Act I aria ‘Vidino divná, přesladká’ as he is drawn further into the woods by the sight of a mysterious creature – soon revealed as Rusalka. But even as the orchestral accompaniment reveals the lovers’ wordless kinship, borrowing from Rusalka’s gleaming, watery language, the tenor’s own thrusting line reminds us that this is a man of flesh and blood rooted in the mortal world; his music is muscular and four-square, painted in powerful slashes of melody. 

As with Rusalka’s own ‘Song to the Moon’, the instrumental transitions between the calm, harmonically secure verses of his aria (a tiny chromatic shudder, heard in the flickering strings) give us a glimpse of the pain to come for a couple who never sing truly together: even as they declare their love in their final duet, they remain divided, alternating rather than sharing phrases, trapped in two different musical worlds.

^{Programme note © Alexandra Coghlan
Alexandra Coghlan is a music journalist and critic who contributes regularly to the Spectator, Prospect, The Independent, Gramophone and Opera magazine; she is the author of Carols from King’s (Ebury, 2016).}

Smetana’s cycle of six patriotic symphonic poems, published under the general title of Má vlast (‘My Fatherland’, c1872–9), is without question his greatest achievement in the genre. It was written largely between 1874 and 1879 but was by no means his first venture into the realms of orchestral tone-poetry. The composer was still in his thirties when, in the summer of 1857, he visited Liszt in Weimar, where he heard the first performances of A Faust Symphony and the symphonic poem Die Ideale. He was overwhelmed and was soon working on a series of his own tone-poems based on literary subjects (after Shakespeare, Schiller, etc.) but, daringly crafted as these pieces undoubtedly are, none quite matches the imagination, vividness or assured writing that Smetana would later achieve with Má vlast. All the more wonder, then, that this formidable edifice grew in the midst of the composer’s debilitating bad health.

In the summer of 1874 Smetana suffered a throat infection followed by a rash and an apparent ‘blockage to the ears’. By mid-August, unable to work, he had transferred his duties as conductor of Prague’s Provisional Theatre to his deputy. A press announcement stated that he had ‘become ill as a result of nervous strain caused by certain people recently’. Worst of all, by the autumn, he had lost hearing in his right ear, while his left ear failed him soon afterwards. Even the availability of funds raised by former students for medical aid abroad failed to help. And the situation was to worsen, leading to depression, insomnia and hallucinations, together with giddiness, cramp and a temporary loss of speech (syphilis often attributed as the root cause of the disastrous decline in his health). Smetana’s interesting but disconcertingly confused later symphonic poem Prague Carnival (1883) can be heard as a symptom of either progressive invention or mental decline. The jury is still out as to the answer.

•••

Má vlast’s second movement, ‘Vltava’, is the cycle’s most celebrated single one. The two flutes that burble into earshot at the start are the two springs – one cold, the other warm – that grant the great Vltava River life. As Smetana himself writes, they soon form ‘a single current’, then (Smetana again) ‘the course of the Vltava [flows] through woods and meadows, through landscapes where a farmer’s wedding is celebrated, the round dance of the mermaids in the night’s moonshine: on the nearby rocks loom proud castles, palaces and ruins aloft. The Vltava swirls into the St John’s Rapids; then it widens and flows towards Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Labe [the Elbe, in German].’ 

^{Programme note © Rob Cowan
Rob Cowan is a broadcaster and writer on music. Formerly a BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM presenter, contributor to The Independent and contributing editor of Gramophone magazine, he has a special interest in the history of orchestral performance. He is the author of The Guinness Classical Top 1000 (Guinness World Records, 1997).}

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus

Dithyrambs were supercharged dance songs performed by male choirs at festivals in ancient Greece. Perhaps the Last Night of the Proms is the nearest we are going to get to that kind of exhilarated jubilation, and no-one could better give it a new wild fling than Samy Moussa, who has ancient Greek culture in his psyche.

His Dithyramb takes its words from a dithyramb by Pindar, who wrote in the fifth century bce. These words survive only because they were quoted four centuries later in a treatise by the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who found in them ‘the austere beauty of a distant past’.

Curving that distant past into the vivid present comes Samy Moussa’s music, which collapses two and a half millennia into five minutes of rousing appeal. ‘Come to the dance’, the full chorus demands at the start, four times over, their voices alone filling the space. The harmony is superbly consonant, as throughout the piece, here supporting a melody that rises and falls in one big wave. This melody and parts of it will recur.

Once the orchestra has entered, the invitation to join the dance is repeated and extended on the way through a stream of ululation to a climax: it is the gods who must come to the dance, and bestow on it their grace. There is a reprise to new words: we know these gods; they move among us in the agora (marketplace). The piece then goes on bounding to its ultimate climax, which the chorus is given a breather to achieve.

^{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.}

1 Allegro appassionato
2 Canzone: Moderato
3 Allegro molto

Yuja Wang piano

A standing ovation followed the first performance of Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto on 24 September 1962. Next morning, music critic Louis Biancolli declared it ‘one of the most spectacular triumphs in the history of American music’. 

The concerto was written for Denver-born pianist John Browning in response to a commission by Barber’s music publisher, Schirmer. Barber was the company’s star composer and was to write a piece to mark its centenary, with the premiere to be part of a gala week of concerts inaugurating the Philharmonic Hall of the new Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. 

Browning was the starting point. Barber wrote for performers, incorporating and reflecting their style and strengths. Browning had a formidable combination of technical skill and sensitivity to colour. He had studied under the celebrated Russian teacher, Rosina Lhévinne, with his playing reflecting her lineage, training and focus on tone. Barber admired Russian-style playing and took everything on board: Browning was adept at doubling sixths (a Lhévinne drill), adopted flat fingers to help melodies sing, and used ‘flutter pedalling’, rapid shallow pedalling that adds resonance without blurring. All were noted.

The first two movements came relatively easily. Barber wrote them in 1960, with the central slow movement a reworking of a flute piece – ‘Elegy’ – written the previous year for Manfred Ibel, an art student and amateur flautist who had become close to Barber. The concerto is dedicated to Ibel, acknowledging his connection. 

Then work stalled. There was no progress in 1961, and by summer 1962, with the premiere looming, Browning still had no finale. It took friend and fellow composer Aaron Copland to provoke action: ‘You cannot treat a soloist like this!’ Barber settled on an idea the next day, later quipping he was ‘terrorized into thinking of something’. 

The final movement was completed on 9 September, merely 15 days before the premiere. Browning recalled learning it from memory as tweaks and changes continued. The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz was even consulted about Browning’s claim that some passages were unplayable at speed. Horowitz agreed, and they were duly revised.

In the event, Browning gave a barnstorming first performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf. It became a signature work for the pianist and proved a major success for Barber, winning him his second Pulitzer Prize and a Music Critics Circle Award.

•••

Barber’s Piano Concerto is a big, dramatic work, requiring the soloist to move between bold muscular outbursts and passages where the piano almost glistens within the orchestral texture. Barber knew the challenge he set Browning, joking: ‘I think it’s good for him to earn his fee, so I made it as difficult as possible!’ While resolutely tonal, there are moments of harmonic ambiguity and extreme chromaticism which root it in 20th-century developments. 

This can be heard in the thorny first movement, which Barber launches with a quasi-cadenza for piano. Three small ideas are introduced, before the first main theme is given by the orchestra. These are explored alongside a second, more lyrical theme, initially on oboe. Barber’s skill with counterpoint (interweaving musical lines) is clear as he presents intricate variations on his principal ideas ahead of a bold restatement of themes culminating in a fortissimo (very loud) conclusion. 

In the second-movement Canzone, Barber’s renowned lyricism comes to the fore. Tender, if somewhat uneasy in tone, its origins as a flute piece can be felt – including in the use of solo flute to present the main theme. Here the piano is required to sing, as long extended lines unfurl over a more restrained orchestral palette. The finale, however, is anything but restrained: a rollicking movement resolutely in an irregular five beats to the bar, it features a relentless ostinato (repeated pattern). Fiendish in spirit, it is a thrilling and percussive rondo with a Bartókian edge that climaxes in a daring flourish and whoosh of a tam-tam. 

^{Programme note © Sophie Redfern}

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

9 to 5 – Jolene – I Will Always Love You

Beverley Knight, Sheridan Smith, Ward Thomasvocals
^{Rupert Hands stagedirector}
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus

By the end of her life Dolly Parton had become so much more than her music. Her life story itself is legendary – from her dirt-poor beginnings writing songs in a one-room shack in Tennessee surrounded by 11 siblings, to landing a regular spot on Porter Wagoner’s popular TV show in the 1960s and 1970s, to her subsequent reinvention as the blonde, big-haired, rhinestoned caricature who never hesitated to make a joke at her own expense, famously telling a journalist, ‘It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.’ In later years it was her kindness that helped to further her legacy; she donated millions of dollars to medical research, children’s literacy and education, disaster relief and animal welfare. Many interview clips have circulated in the weeks since her death – Dolly through the decades, never deviating from her gospel: to lead with kindness. But even her status as an emblem of goodwill and unity can’t overshadow the brilliance of her music – her depth of feeling, her easy skill with melody and the emotional precision of her lyrics.

‘9 to 5’, that anthem of the workplace grind, was written for the 1980 film in which Parton starred alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Its brisk, clattering rhythm was partly inspired by Dolly strumming across her acrylic fingernails, which created a sound like a typewriter, while its lyrics take aim at the drudgery, lousy pay and power imbalance of office life. Somehow she turns all of that frustration into something buoyant enough to dance to (or roar along to at the office-party karaoke).

‘Jolene’ is another complex tale told with effortless country-pop clarity, inspired by a woman who had flirted with Dolly’s husband, Carl Dean. It’s a novel take on the well-worn trope of the ‘jealous woman’; Dolly is awestruck by Jolene – her beauty, her power, the threat she poses, and simply pleads with her not to take the man she loves. 

‘I Will Always Love You’ is often interpreted as a romantic farewell, but Dolly wrote it to mark the end of her professional partnership with Porter Wagoner as she struck out on her own. She later refused to surrender the publishing rights when Elvis wanted to record it. Two decades later Whitney Houston turned it into one of the biggest pop ballads of all time. Dolly never forgot the value of a great song.

^{Programme note © Deb Grant
Deb Grant is a Dublin-born DJ, broadcaster and writer who has spent over 20 years hunting for records around the world. She currently hosts a daily radio show on BBC Radio 6 Music which spotlights the best in new underground music of every genre.}

The working title for Holst’s most famous composition was Seven Pieces for Large Orchestra, intended as a direct homage to Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, composed in 1909. The orchestra required for what became The Planets is even vaster than Schoenberg’s, including yet more woodwind, a huge percussion section and both organ and celesta. A little reluctant at first to divulge the inspiration for his work (originally described as a series of ‘mood pictures’), Holst later revealed to Richard Capell, a critic at TheDaily Mail, that it evoked ‘the seven influences of destiny and constituents of our spirit’. For The Planets is concerned not with the astronomical but with the astrological qualities of the planets. Holst had developed a great interest in astrology – he was given to preparing charts for his friends – and had been drawn to theosophy and mysticism for many years before that. The order of the movements, as Holst scholar Raymond Head has noted, is given according to astrological principles, not the physical placing of the planets in the solar system. Mars, for example, is the ruler of Aries, the first sign in the zodiac; Venus is the ruler of Taurus, the second sign – and so on. The movements progress through the ‘constituents’ of the spirit, from the reckless youth of Mars to the acquisition of Neptune’s state of mysticism which, as Capell put it, ‘swims in mystery’. 

‘Jupiter’, the ‘bringer of jollity’, rules Sagittarius and Pisces and is full of surprises. It opens with a great sense of anticipation, all flurries of strings and jaunty syncopations. It then segues into an appropriately jolly tune, followed by a swaggering melody in three-time. None of this prepares the listener for the arrival of a noble tune which, in 1921, became attached to the poem ‘I vow to thee my country’ (with words by Cecil Spring Rice). Holst named it ‘Thaxted’, after the village in Essex where he had lived for some years. Jupiter reasserts its jollity in the remaining minutes, and concludes with a blistering medley of the themes heard throughout.

^{Programme note © Lucy Walker
Musicologist and public speaker Lucy Walker has written and spoken frequently about Benjamin Britten, and is Public Engagement Associate for Britten Pears Arts this year.}

1 Snowflakes (Allegro vivace)
2 Lyrical Waltz (Moderato)
3 Polka (Allegretto)
4 Fast Movement (Presto)

Yuja Wang piano

Jazz teetered on the edge of stylistic and ideological acceptability in the Soviet Union. Alexander Tsfasman composed his Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra at the triumphant end of the Second World War, when the genre’s popularity in the country had reached a tenuous high point. During the war many Soviet officials had hesitantly embraced Western forms of popular music to boost public morale. Tsfasman and his jazz band even ventured out to perform for Red Army soldiers on the front lines in 1942. Daring, playful and at times unabashedly romantic, the Jazz Suite encapsulates the feeling of postwar Soviet euphoria. 

Less than a year following the work’s completion, however, official Soviet support for jazz disintegrated. Several prominent jazz musicians fell out of favour, including the trumpet virtuoso Eddie Rosner, who was sent to a Gulag labour camp on dubious charges. Though Tsfasman managed to evade the worst of the crackdown, the Jazz Suite never received the attention that it deserved in its own time. 

The piece showcases both Tsfasman’s conservatory training as a pianist and his sincere admiration for early American jazz. The first movement opens with syncopated snow flurries that gradually develop into a cascading winter landscape. It is as if a Rachmaninov piano concerto were sandwiched in the middle of a ragtime piano roll. In the ‘Lyrical Waltz’, Tsfasman fully gives in to the wistful feeling of toská, or sadness for no particular reason – a concept explored by nearly every composer who studied in Moscow.

Just when we have all but forgotten about jazz, groups of staccato (short detached) notes in the third movement bring the honking horns from Gershwin’s An American in Paris to mind. This is less a ‘Polka’ than Tsfasman’s own sort of ‘A Soviet in Paris’. It is no surprise that Tsfasman performed the Soviet premiere of Rhapsody in Blue in the same year that he composed his own Jazz Suite. In the aptly named ‘Fast Movement’, Tsfasman pushes Gershwin into overdrive with finger-bending licks and an avalanche of octave runs.

^{Programme note © Ryan Gourley
Ryan Gourley is the Curator of the Collection of Recorded Sound at the Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco. His research on Soviet music has been published in the Cambridge Opera Journal and The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies (Taylor & Francis, 2024).}

Kishmul’s Galley – The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond – Donald, Where’s Yer Troosers? – The Rowan Tree – Roamin’ in the gloamin’ – The Song of the Clyde – My love is like a red, red rose – The Wee Cooper of Fife – The Deil’s awa’ wi’ th’ Exciseman

Nicky Spence tenor
BBC Singers

The tradition of Scottish song is both long-standing and world-famous. ‘Scotch Snap’ is named for the eponymous ‘jaggy’ rhythm in Scots fiddle music, nodding nicely to the fact that many Scots songs use dance tunes as their base. This medley includes some of the best loved of Scots songs, from the sentimental ‘The Rowan Tree’ by Lady Carolina Oliphant to the Jacobite-infused ‘The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond’, best known now via the Gaelic band Runrig. 

Scots songs are as much connected to place as they are representative of Scottish history, language, character and personality. Stuart Calvert’s medley of them takes us around the country, from the Hebridean Isle of Barra with its dramatic ‘Kishmul’s Galley’ of Gaelic tradition, across the Highlands to Fife, with its ‘Wee Cooper’. In the south-west we find Robert Burns, songwriter and collector extraordinaire who is now synonymous with Scottish song. His most famous of love songs likening love to ‘a red, red rose’ (1794) features along with his humorous ‘The Deil’s [or Devil’s] awa’ wi’ th’ Exciseman’ (1792), in which he pokes fun at his last job as a tax man! And you’ll be singing his world-famous ‘Auld lang syne’ later tonight. 

Harry Lauder’s music-hall hit ‘Roamin’ in the gloamin’’ (1911) is in there, as is Gourlay and Bell’s later ‘The Song of the Clyde’, both reminding us of the important role of Scots song in popular Scottish culture at home and abroad throughout the 20th century. Scots most love the songs that are sad and slow, but they don’t always take themselves too seriously. This is brilliantly showcased by ‘Donald, Where’s Yer Troosers?’ – composed by Neil Grant with lyrics by popular singer Andy Stewart – which both celebrates the kilt and outlines the practical challenges of wearing it! 

The Tartan Army knows a thing or two about kilts. They might have had a short trip to the World Cup, but they did show us that Scots song and the passion of Scots for singing is very much alive and kicking – you might also listen out for a wee reminder of this …

^{Programme note © Kirsteen McCue 
Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture at the University of Glasgow.}

BBC Singers

The text for this piece is Iris of Life by a remarkable woman, the Native American poet Zitkála-Šá (1876–1938). Born as a member of the Yankton Dakota Sioux, she received a Quaker education and went on to become a poet, musician and political activist, campaigning for Native American rights. 

This uplifting poem suggests that small acts of human kindness accumulate over time just as single drops of rain combine to form a grand rainbow. Every individual good deed will add to the whole (‘moments into seasons flow’), wearing away ‘the shell of selfishness’ under which we have a tendency to hide. Individual acts of kindness have a cumulative effect, gladdening our own ‘weary hearts’ and inspiring us to seek yet more light. 

Iris was the Greek goddess of the rainbow, seen as the channel of communication between the gods on Mount Olympus and the mortal world. The text is unusually optimistic and I wanted my setting to reflect its spirit of joyfulness and celebration of the potential of human kindness. 

The piece starts with high shimmering strings evoking a faint rainbow. The harp provides the first drops of ‘crystal rain’ and the voices enter, one part at a time, beginning the gradual accumulation of the raindrops. The word ‘light’ appears twice in the poem and is indeed its final word. Musically I have tried to emphasise the significance of the word by leading the voices towards it both times. 

^{Programme note © Anne Dudley}

Nicky Spence tenor
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus

Based on short stories by Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls plays on the archetypes of musical comedy. The show depicts the unlikely romance between New York’s luckiest gambler, Sky Masterson, and Sergeant Sarah Brown of the ‘Save-a-Soul Mission’ (standing in for the Salvation Army). When the Mission is threatened with closure due to lack of attendance, Sky makes a high-stakes wager. He bets each of his fellow gamblers $1,000: if they lose they have to attend the Mission to save Sarah’s skin. 

He wins, of course, and ‘Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat’ is a gospel-infused number in which one of the gamblers, Nicely-Nicely Johnson, improvises an explanation to the head of the Mission of how he came to be converted in a dream, leading the cast in a rousing and spontaneous showstopper. The musical opened on 24 November 1950 and was an instant smash for its composer-lyricist Frank Loesser. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical, goingon to further acclaim in the UK in 1953 and in numerous revivals internationally. The movie version opened in November 1955, with Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons and Vivian Blaine in the lead roles.

^{Programme note © Dominic Broomfield-McHugh
Dominic Broomfield-McHugh is Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield and is co-editor of The Letters of Frank Loesser (Yale UP, 2025).}

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)

Nicky Spencetenor
BBC Singers • BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation

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 21 October, 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 HMS Victory, 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 17 June 1778 between HMS Arethusa 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’sno 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 ‘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 I whip up the orchestra in a fierce accelerando which leaves behind all those whose stamping technique is not of the very first quality. I like 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 Limavady 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
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}

8Rule Britannia! (Thomas Arne, arr. Malcolm Sargent)
Tenor
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, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.

Tenor
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, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.

Tenor
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, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.

^{James Thomson (1700–48)} 

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation

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 that ‘rose and yelled’. 

Artists often talk about launching a work into the world, where it finds a life of its own. But the 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 and Hawkes’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)}

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation

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 addinga 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 Blake’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)}

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation (verse 2 only)

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 ‘La 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 toa 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!

^Anon.

BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
with audience participation

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 likea red, red rose’ for Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti. 

^{Programme note © Hannah French}

Choirs and Audience
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 is Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Artistic Partner with the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, Conductor Laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (Chief Conductor, 2008–21) and Honorary Conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Chief Conductor, 2003–12). Also a violinist, he was originally concert-master of the Finnish RSO before holding positions as Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Principal Conductor of West Coast Kokkola Opera and Artistic Director of Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. 

He has extended his contract with the BBC SO to its centenary year in 2030 and this summer conducts it in four Proms, including the Last Night. Elsewhere he has worked with leading international ensembles such as the Berlin, Dresden and New York Philharmonic orchestras, Boston, NHK (Tokyo) and Vienna Symphony orchestras, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Staatskapelle Dresden, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome. During the 2025/6 season Sakari Oramo has continued to champion new music with the BBC SO, including works by Thomas Adès, Cecilia Damström, Detlev Glanert, Magnus Lindberg, Camille Pépin and Dame Judith Weir. 

His recent recordings include two albums of Grażyna Bacewicz’s orchestral works and Dora Pejačević’s Piano Concerto and Symphony, all with the BBC SO, and Langgaard’s Symphony No. 1 with the Berlin Philharmonic. Other notable recordings include works by Ravel, Nielsen and Schumann with the RSPO and all of Sibelius’s symphonies with the CBSO. 

Nicky Spence tenor

Nicky Spence has earned a place as one of the UK’s leading international tenors. BBC Music Magazine named him Personality of the Year in 2022 and the following year he was appointed OBE. In 2024 he won the RPS Singer Award. 

Highlights of the coming season include a return to the Royal Opera as Tichon (Katya Kabanova), to the Hamburg Staatsoper as Finn/Bayan (Ruslan and Lyudmila) and to the Festival Janáček in Brno as Ctirad (Šárka), Laca (Jenůfa) and in the title-role in The Excursions of Mr Brouček to the Moon and to the 15th Century. He also makes his debuts with the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona and Deutsche Oper Berlin. On the concert stage he performs The Dream of Gerontius with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, in addition to Laca with the Bamberg Symphony.

In recent engagements he has appeared with the Philadelphia Opera, Opéra de Paris and Glyndebourne, as well as making his debut in the title-role in Peter Grimes for Welsh National Opera. In concert he has worked with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle, the Philharmonia Orchestra under Marin Alsop and the Hallé under Kahchun Wong.

Noted in particular for his interpretations of Janáček’s music, he was awarded the Leoš Janáček Memorial Medal at the Janáček Brno Festival in 2024, while in 2020 he won BBC Music Magazine’s Vocal Award and Gramophone’s Solo Vocal Award for his recording of Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared. He gives recitals internationally and has curated a residency at London’s Wigmore Hall.

Yuja Wang piano

Yuja Wang is celebrated for her charismatic artistry and captivating stage presence. She has performed with the world’s most esteemed conductors, musicians and ensembles. Her recent activities have included a collaborative project with the late David Hockney at London’s Lightroom, play-direct tours in Europe and South America with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra – of which she is Artistic Partner – an international duo recital tour with Víkingur Ólafsson and a residency with the New York Philharmonic. 

Highlights of this season include the season-opening gala concert at Carnegie Hall, where she play-directed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and the season-opening concerts with the San Francisco Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra; a European tour with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra; a recital tour throughout Asia; and performances with the Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) and the New York and Rotterdam Philharmonic orchestras. Her play-directing engagements this season have also included tours with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra to Spain and the USA. In November last year, Playing with Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang opened at the Paris Philharmonie; this groundbreaking multi-sensory installation takes visitors behind the scenes and offers a rare perspective into the emotion and artistry behind Yuja Wang’s performances.

As a recording artist she has garnered multiple awards, including two Grammy Awards and five Grammy nominations.

Credits

Controller, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Proms SamJackson
Director of Artistic Planning, BBC Proms HannahDonat
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