First Night of the Proms 2025, review: Swirl of musical journeys is a perfect start to the season
We felt salt spray in Mendelssohn, surveyed gloomy Finnish landscapes in Sibelius, jigged in our seats to Caribbean dances courtesy of Errollyn Wallen, and finally were transported into a strange, nameless Beyond by Vaughan Williams.
It was an apt opening for a season that promises to take us on many musical journeys. There's an impressive roster of foreign orchestras to look forward to, an equally impressive array of new pieces, and the Proms itself is peripatetic, with eye-catching events in venues around Britain. And there's a welcome embrace of tough, bracing music, including masterpieces by those two great modernist composers in their centenary year, Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez. No-one can say this season is soft-centred.
But the Proms wouldn't be the Proms without its lighter moments, and this opening concert struck a nice balance between aspiration to the heights and straightforward enjoyment. And it also launched the season on a high, in terms of performance.
Following Arthur Bliss's affectionate and far-from-pompous Birthday Fanfare for Sir Henry Wood (the Proms' stalwart main conductor for its first half-century), the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo gave a performance of the Hebrides Overture that was striking in its subtle colours, delicate phrasing and unerring dramatic pacing.
However it was put in the shade by the performance from Georgian violinist Lia Batiashvili of Sibelius's violin concerto. The piece is so hugely demanding technically that often one becomes aware of the soloist's struggles. That can be expressive in itself of course, but it was a joy to hear a violinist who simply soared over the difficulties, and allowed the music's poetry to shine through—above all the opening, whose far-away, fragile sadness has rarely seemed so poignant.
After that, we were whisked southwards by the swaying rhythms and sultry maracas of The Elements, a brand-new BBC commission from Errollyn Wallen, the Belize-born Master of the King's Music. The title had nothing to do with the weather—it refers to the basic building blocks of music, such as bass riffs, melodic hooks, tangy chords, all handled with Wallen's customary saucy relish. We even had pompous Handelian fanfares and a brief snatch of Purcell. The piece felt just a tad over-extended but even so it was a delight.
Finally came Sancta Civitas, a musical evocation of the dazzling new heaven envisioned in the Book of Revelation, composed for three choirs (the BBC Chorus and Singers and London Youth Choirs), two soloists (including the superbly otherworldly Gerald Finley), organ and orchestra by Vaughan Williams.
Again it was the subtlety of the performance, the way Oramo carefully calibrated the shifting choral and orchestral layers to give a sense of new worlds emerging through layers of cloud, that really hit home. You can hear this terrific opening concert for 30 days via BBC Sounds; don't miss it.
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