Three Korean soloists perform concertos at this year’s Proms, including Yunchan Lim who opens the festival.
17 July (First Night): Yunchan Lim (piano)
Dalia Stasevska and massed BBC forces launch the 2026 season with an American accent. The widescreen vision of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man zooms in to teeming city streets in Gershwin’s ‘rhapsodic ballet’ An American in Paris, before piano superstar Yunchan Lim performs Ravel’s bluesy Concerto in G major, a musical postcard inspired by the composer’s time in the States. The second half sees a world premiere from French-British composer Josephine Stephenson, before Finzi’s ode to the patron saint of music, premiered in this same Hall nearly 80 years ago.
Broadcast live on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer
Programme
Aaron Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man (3 mins)
George Gershwin: An American in Paris (16 mins)
Maurice Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major (23 mins)
Josephine Stephenson: That the sunrise not leave us unmoved (8 mins – BBC commission: world premiere)
Gerald Finzi: For St Cecilia (19 mins)
Performers
Yunchan Lim: piano
Thomas Atkins: tenor
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Dalia Stasevska: conductor
21 July: Sueye Park (violin)
‘Sensational’ 2025 Sibelius Competition-winner Sueye Park makes her Proms debut, joining John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra as soloist in Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. All fire and ice, a love song for the composer’s own instrument, it’s the Romantic concerto par excellence: deeply personal and powerfully expressive. Sibelius’s Nordic lakes meet the choppy ocean waters of Betsy Jolas’s Tales of a Summer Sea, and later the dark forests and tectonic stirrings of Strauss’s Nietzsche-inspired tone-poem Also sprach Zarathustra, its blazing orchestral sunrise made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Programme
Betsy Jolas: Tales of a Summer Sea (15 mins – UK premiere)
Jean Sibelius: Violin Concerto in D minor (35 mins)
Richard Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra (33 mins)
Performers
Sueye Park: violin
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
John Storgårds: conductor
13 August: Yeol Eum Son (piano)
James Gaffigan and the BBC Symphony Orchestra mark the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence with 100 years of American music. South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son joins the orchestra for Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F major – its Charleston rhythms and songful slow movement capturing the energy of 20th-century New York. Samuel Barber’s rarely heard Symphony No. 1 in One Movement marries the lyrical intensity of the composer’s beloved Adagio with taut structural drama. The concert opens with the UK premiere of contemporary jazz great Wynton Marsalis’s mercurial, kaleidoscopic Concerto for Orchestra.
Programme
Wynton Marsalis: Concerto for Orchestra (36 mins – BBC co-commission: UK premiere)
George Gershwin: Piano Concerto in F major (31 mins)
Samuel Barber: Symphony No. 1 in One movement (21 mins)
Performers
Yeol Eum Son: piano
BBC Symphony Orchestra
James Gaffigan: conductor