Ulster Orchestra Starring at the Proms
Issue Date: 10th July 2008
The Ulster Orchestra celebrates a Belfast centenary at this year’s BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Conducted by Principal Conductor Kenneth Montgomery, the Orchestra will delight a Proms audience with a special concert which includes music by the Belfast-born composer Howard Ferguson, born exactly one hundred years ago. He was a pupil of Vaughan Williams and the Orchestra’s Proms concert opens with Ferguson’s Overture for an Occasion, commissioned by BBC Northern Ireland as part of the 1953 coronation celebrations.
Another Irish link will be the richly romantic Second Piano Concerto by the Dublin-born composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. He, in turn, was the teacher of Vaughan Williams. The piano soloist will be the young Irish pianist Finghin Collins, making his Proms début, but no stranger to Belfast audiences.
The concert’s all-Czech second half features Smetana's popular portrait of the River Vltava and Dvořák's lively Eighth Symphony.
This celebration of the performing arts in Northern Ireland, on Thursday 7 August, will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. A full house is anticipated – with plenty of support from the Ulster Orchestra’s home crowd, including a considerable number of the Friends of the Ulster Orchestra.
This will be the Orchestra’s ninth appearance at the prestigious London music-fest which opens on Friday 18 July and runs to Saturday 13 September when the Last Night of the Proms will again feature the Ulster Orchestra at Proms in the Park, which this year comes from Belfast’s City Hall.