First Night of Prom Review – 250th Anniversary of US Independence Takes Center Stage | Concerts 2026

AAnd we are back. The world’s greatest classical music festival has opened the doors of the Royal Albert Hall for another eight-week season. While the last night of concerts is often strangely disconnected – a self-contained concert for a very different audience – the first night is the celebration for those who are here for the long haul, the maker of the scene and the season in microcosm. So what will this year say?

Whatever the current geopolitical pressures, the “special relationship” lives on in the concert hall. The 250th anniversary of America’s independence takes center stage this summer (because nationalism is always less embarrassing when it’s someone else’s), and it was cheered from the start with Aaron Copland’s crowd-pleasing “A Noise for the Common Man.”

Motivating the BBC Symphony Orchestra with its characteristic dynamism, principal guest conductor Dalia Stasevska barely lifts our eyes to the vast vistas of hope and eternity that Copland so subtly and indefinitely conjures before they are drawn back to street level: to the crowded streets and traffic jams of Gershwin’s Paris.

Stasevska not only gives us “An American in Paris,” she gives us an American view of Paris. This was a description both broad and deep, and the scenes were larger and brighter, piling powerfully one after another in shots of wind and brass. There’s no time for sidewalk-side pasties and people-watching here, but the BBCSO (including some woodwinds and brass soloists) was with her every breathless step of the way.

It may have been USA 2 – France 0 but a rematch between the two countries was already bookended in the form of Ravel’s New York-accented Piano Concerto in G major – South Korean superstar Yeonchan Lim as the soloist. If this is French music, it is the France of Le Corbusier, Boulez and Brancusi: brilliant, clean and completely unsentimental. Not for Lim’s sake are the jazz temptations of the final piece, nor the enthusiastic indulgence at the score’s climax. Instead, we got the precision of a study in the gleaming hallways, and a slow movement of introspective tenderness that was barely audible in the auditorium. It was the performance of a pianist who, for all the circus that follows him, seems to avoid spectacle.

So far, so consistent. But the desire to be everything to everyone overcame programming after this period. A new Emily Dickinson-based commission for the Anglo-French composer Josephine Stevenson didn’t have much to say, but said it intermittently loudly, while Finzi’s rarely heard St. Cecilia was rousing, but at its best when pretending to be Hubert Parry or Vaughan Williams. Soloist Thomas Atkins did beautiful things with Edmund Blunden’s Horrific poetry, and the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus gave it the full Jerusalem but the occasion enhanced the stature of the minor piece.

Fortunately the BBC had a trick up their sleeve for extra time. Wonderwall appears For the massive voices and orchestra it was meant to be a tribute to the World Cup but it happened a little differently in light of this week’s events. A tribute from Manchester’s finest players (and Andy Burnham’s favorite band) to the Prime Minister-in-waiting. Who says parties aren’t political?