Opening Night of the Fifty-Ninth Season of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts

Moiseiwitsch (piano)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
(Leader, Paul Beard)
Conductor, Sir Malcolm Sargent

Part 1 at 7.30
God Save the Queen
Overture: Cockaigne...Elgar
7.49 app. Piano Concerto No. 2, in C minor...Rachmaninov
8.24 app. A London Symphony...Vaughan Williams

Part 2 at 9.25
Suite: La Boutique Fantasque...Rossini-Respighi
9.48 app. Coronation March: Orb and Sceptre...William Walton

The opening concert of the Coronation Vaughan Williams' London Symphony Year season of Proms consists, appro- takes us to 1914. Despite the presence priately, of works connected, in one way of several familiar and peaceful London or another, with London. sounds, such as the Westminster chimes, the tempo of the city has quickened Elgar`s Cockaigne' Overture (sub- and there is an underlying sense of titled In London Town ') breathes the uneasiness. air of Edwardian times, but also La Boutique Fantasque recalls the describes vividly the abiding character- brilliant seasons of ballet given by istics of the Londoner - his quick Wit, his Diaghilev in London: it Was first propatnotism, his sense of pageantry. duced at the Alhambra Theatre in 1919. It was in London at that time, at a With Sir William Walton's Coronation Philharmonic Concert in Queen Hall, March, we reach the present day: comin 1902, that Rachmaninov's Second missioned by the Arts Council, and Piano Concerto was heard for the first ' dedicated by gracious permission to time in its entirety. The soloist was not H.M. Queen Elizabeth II,' it was first Rachmaninov, who had played the second played shortly before the Queen entered and third movements in Moscow the Westminster Abbey for her coronation. previous year, but Basil Sapellnikov. (Deryck Cooke)

From the Royal Albert Hall, London