Every day for the rest of the summer, you can listen to the world’s oldest and largest music festival — the BBC Proms — free at home, just by accessing the BBC-3 website during a concert and and clicking “play.” .
The 2026 Proms, the festival’s 129th edition, will present 86 concerts between July 17 and Sept. 12. The traditional home of the Proms is London’s Royal Albert Hall, but concerts are also broadcast from Bristol, Wales, Gateshead, and other locations.
Evening concerts from Royal Albert Hall begin at 7 or 7:30 p.m. British Summer Time, which is 11 or 11:30 a.m. on the U.S. West Coast. For information about afternoon and late-night Proms concerts, see the BBC website.
The Proms are carried on BBC TV for which the annual universal license is £180 ($241); Proms TV in the U.S. is available through Apple TV.
The concert series began outdoors as the Promenades in 1838, though similar concerts had been performed in London’s gardens since the 18th century. Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame, was one of its directors. The Proms took its present form in 1895, under the direction of the conductor Henry Wood (whose bust sits at the back of the Royal Albert Hall) and was then taken over by the BBC, which began these broadcasts 99 years ago.
Opening night on July 17 will be conducted by Dalia Stasevska and South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim is slated to be the featured soloist in Maurice Ravel’s Concerto in G Major.
The concert will also include Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man; George Gershwin’s An American in Paris; Gerald Finzi’s For St Cecilia; and the world premiere of Josephine Stephenson’s That the sunrise not leave us unmoved, a BBC commission.
Among the festival highlights:
– July 20, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Gianandrea Noseda conducting the BBC Philharmonic; also J.S. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, and Jessie Montgomery’s These Righteous Paths, with South African cellist Abel Selaocoe.
– July 22, Sakari Oramo conducts the BBC Symphony in Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6; also György Kurtág’s orchestral elegy Stele.
– July 26, Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos (Lucas and Arthur Jussen, soloists); also Kazuki Yamada conducts the City of Birmingham Symphony in Poulenc’s Sinfonietta and John Adams’s Harmonium.
– July 30, Alena Baeva is the soloist in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto, Delyana Lazarova conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony; also Dobrinka Tabakova’s Orpheus’ Comet and Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5.
– Aug. 5 (at 2:15 p.m. PDT), “Under African Skies: The Songs of Graceland,” featuring Ladysmith Black Mambazo in its Proms debut 40 years after the release of Paul Simon’s Graceland.
– Aug. 6, Mark Elder conducts the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir in Carl Maria von Weber’s final opera, Oberon; starring Nicky Spence, Jennifer Davis, and Charles Castronovo.
– Aug. 10, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the combined orchestras of London’s Royal Academy of Music and New York’s Juilliard School in Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (Vilde Frang, soloist), Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, and Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra,
The season-closing “Last Night at the Proms” on Sept. 12, will be conducted by Sakari Oramo, with pianist Yuja Wang and tenor Nicky Spence in the event’s traditional electric atmosphere, enthusiastic audience participation, and traditional renditions of patriotic British anthems.
