BBC launches 2023 Proms season

The BBC has today released the programme for the 2023 Proms season, featuring 84 concerts and over 3,000 musicians. Running from 14 July to 9 September the season will present over 50 artist debuts as well as 23 premieres including 15 new works commissioned for the festival.

This year’s Proms will see Newcastle’s Sage Gateshead welcome the first North-East Proms festival, with Royal Northern Sinfonia and conductor Robert Ames collaborating on a weekend of family, orchestral and chamber concerts. The festival will also present concerts in Derry, Aberystwyth, Dewsbury, Truro, Perth and Great Yarmouth which will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 alongside every Prom at the Royal Albert Hall.

BBC Radio 3 controller Sam Jackson said: ‘I’m greatly looking forward to my first Proms season as Controller, with such an ambitious and diverse series of concerts on offer – at the Royal Albert Hall, and across the UK. And I’m delighted that, for the first time, most Proms will be available on BBC Sounds for a year, extending the national and international reach of the world’s biggest and longest-running classical music festival.’

The festival will bring together 24 orchestras and choirs from across the UK as well as welcoming international ensembles including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which will present an ‘audience choice’ programme, allowing the audience to vote live from a list of 250 works. The BBC Orchestras and Choirs will perform in 32 Proms across the season and the BBC Singers, recently saved from disbandment, will perform at five Proms including the First and Last Nights.

The season kicks off with Dalia Stasevska leading the BBC Symphony orchestra and chorus and the BBC Singers plus the pianist Paul Lewis in a First Night programme including a world premiere of a new work by Ukrainian composer Bohdana Frolyak commissioned by the BBC. Marin Alsop will lead the festival’s Last Night with performances by cellist Sheku Kanneh- Mason and soprano Lise Davidsen in a programme of opera arias, songs, spirituals, choral anthems and traditional favourites as well as the premiere of a new work by James B Wilson

The Proms will celebrate composer anniversaries including the 100^th anniversary of the death of Dora Pejačević, the 100^th anniversary of the birth of György Ligeti, and the 400^th anniversary of the deaths of both Thomas Weelkes and William Byrd. The 150th anniversary of Rachmaninov’s birth will also be marked with the performance of 11 of his works during the season including The Bells, performed by the BBC Symphony Chorus, the Hallé and the Hallé Choir under Sir Mark Elder.

Sir Simon Rattle will return to the Royal Albert Hall to conduct two concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, featuring Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 and Poulenc’s Figure humaine, and Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri. Sir John Eliot Gardiner will lead the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique in the first complete performance of Berlioz’s five-act grand opera The Trojans in the UK for more than 10 years. György Kurtág’s first opera Endgame will receive its UK premiere at the Proms with a performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra led by Ryan Wigglesworth.

This year will also include a Bollywood Prom which will see Indian singer Palak Muchhal join forces with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and a Northern Soul Prom curated by broadcaster Stuart Maconie in partnership with BBC Radio 6 Music and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Younger audiences will be excited by a Horrible Histories Prom focusing on the history of opera through the British comedy series’ witty and irreverent lens.

You can find the full programme for the 2023 Proms as well as more information and tickets at the BBC Proms homepage.