Three heatwaves in, but the summer hasn’t truly started until the Proms begin, and on Friday, Radio 3 and the BBC Symphony Orchestra light the blue touchpaper of eight weeks of music-making at the Royal Albert Hall and beyond. Like me, you might have been through the Proms guide marking up the concerts you most want to hear, but what’s always surprising as the summer of music unfolds are the concerts you couldn’t have predicted as being remarkable; the concerts that might look unexceptional on paper but in the flesh of performance find special resonance, be that the groups making their debuts, the brand new music and Proms premieres, or simply that alchemy that means that concerts that are days or weeks apart create musical and creative connections you’d never have thought possible.
Predicting surprises and revelations of a season that hasn’t even begun is of course a pointless and contradictory exercise, but of the new music on offer there are many works that should merit their own marker-pen tick. The First Night’s world premiere of Josephine Stephenson’s That the Sunrise Not Leave Us Unmoved, and Jessie Montgomery’s cello concerto for Abel Selaocoe, These Righteous Paths, on 20 July, should make a wonderfully contrasting pairing – Stephenson has written music of poetic refinement while Montgomery and Selaocoe’s concerto collaboration promises an experience of soul-searching power. “A living organism that gradually absorbs orchestra and audience alike into its breathing body” wrote Michelle Assay at the work’s North American premiere in Toronto.
