The Proms begins on Friday, and the first week already points listeners toward new music that should not be missed. Josephine Stephenson’s world premiere, That the Sunrise Not Leave Us Unmoved, opens The First Night, while Jessie Montgomery’s cello concerto for Abel Selaocoe, These Righteous Paths, is set for 20 July.
That matters because the world’s biggest classical music festival runs for eight weeks, with Radio 3 and the Symphony Orchestra opening the season at the Royal Albert Hall and beyond. For anyone searching Iplayer for what to watch next, these are the dates that give the season shape before the full stretch of concerts unfolds.
These Righteous Paths already arrives with a strong claim on attention. Michelle Assay described it, after its North American premiere in Toronto, as “a living organism that gradually absorbs orchestra and audience alike into its breathing body.” That is the sort of language usually reserved for a piece that does more than fill a slot in a programme; it suggests a work that changes the room around it.
The same preview also picks out two later concerts that widen the sense of what this Proms season wants to do. On 22 July, Sakari Oramo conducts György Kurtág’s Stele with the Symphony, a work Kurtág wrote in 1994 for the Berlin Philharmonic and in memory of his friend András Mihály. On 27 July, Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic bring Kristine Tjøgersen’s Between Trees, written in 2021.
There is a small contradiction at the heart of any Proms guide. Predicting surprises is a pointless and contradictory exercise, yet the point of the preview is to tell readers which concerts they should not miss. That tension is not a flaw so much as the festival’s working method: the season is big enough that some of its most memorable moments cannot be known in advance, but the opening dates are clear enough to make a map for listeners who want one.
By the time Between Trees reaches 27 July, the early weeks will already have shown whether the festival’s new works are living up to the billing. For now, the answer is simpler: the Proms is opening with premieres, and the first names to mark are Stephenson, Montgomery, Kurtág and Tjøgersen.
