Some eighty years after Gerald Finzi's For St Cecilia first rang through the same space, the Royal Albert Hall once again played host to a ceremonial opening. On 17 July the BBC Proms began its annual summer stretch with a programme that leaned heavily, and rather unexpectedly, into American soil. The choice carried its own quiet logic. What better way to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence than by letting the orchestral colours of Copland and Gershwin speak across the Atlantic while the massed British choirs answered?
Dalia Stasevska conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Chorus and Singers with her customary clarity. The evening opened with Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, its bare brass chords cutting through the Victorian gloom like a declaration issued without ornament. George Gershwin's An American in Paris followed before the interval, its taxi horns and bluesy asides reminding listeners that even the most sophisticated orchestral writing can carry the swagger of the street. Between them sat Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major, delivered by the South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim with a mixture of glistening precision and understated warmth. The French composer's memories of his own American tour seemed to hover just beneath the surface.
After the break came the world premiere of Josephine Stephenson's That the sunrise not leave us unmoved. The French-British composer has a gift for translucent textures that never quite settle into easy consonance; here the BBC-commissioned piece sat between older works like an unannounced guest at a long-established table. Its presence felt characteristic of the Proms at their best: willing to extend the tradition without pretending the past can be airbrushed away. The concert closed with Finzi's ode to the patron saint of music, tenor Thomas Atkins threading his line through the choral fabric with evident affection for a piece born in the same hall nearly eight decades earlier.
The First Night was broadcast live on BBC Two, BBC iPlayer, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds, ensuring that anyone with a decent aerial or internet connection could join the ritual. The 2026 season runs until 12 September, promising 86 Proms and a dozen world premieres in total. Yet the opening concert carried a particular weight. In an age when cultural institutions sometimes chase novelty for its own sake, the Proms continue to offer something rarer: a deliberate, unhurried conversation between repertoire that has earned its place and new work that must justify its inclusion on musical grounds alone.
There is a subtle melancholy in all this pageantry. The Royal Albert Hall itself, with its vast acoustic and slightly faded grandeur, stands as a monument to Victorian confidence in the civilising power of art. To fill it with American fanfares, French-inflected jazz and British choral writing is not an act of cultural surrender but a confident assertion of lineage. The Anglosphere has always been a porous thing; its music, like its language, absorbs influences without dissolving. Stephenson's new piece, placed amid these established voices, suggested that the tradition remains robust enough to welcome fresh material without losing its shape.