BBC Proms
Programme & Performers
Edmund Thornton Jenkins arr Tuffus Zimbabwe - Dance Suite
Samuel Barber - Knoxville: Summer of 1915
Anthony Parnther Ballades
Antonín Dvořák - Symphony No. 8 in G major
Our 2026 Prom opens with the premiere of a suite drawn from music for a ballet left incomplete by the South Carolina-born Edmund
Thornton Jenkins, who died aged only 32.
American soprano Angel Blue sings Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 – a child’s all-encompassing vision of life in a teeming urban centre – as well as new arrangements of songs by some of 20th-century America’s greatest tunesmiths: Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Margaret Bonds, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers.
After the interval we swap cities for forests and fields in the ecstatic nature hymn that is Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8.