Proms 99: The next seven days
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Les Boreades is guaranteed to count among the highlights of the whole Proms season. Simon Rattle (above) is the guarantee personified. And with a cast led by the light, bright, sweetly all-American soprano Barbara Bonney, it should dust down an opera better known to musicologists than living audiences. Les Boreades was the late- flowering masterpiece of Jean-Philippe Rameau: the presiding figure (after Lully) of the French baroque, working-partner of Voltaire, and deviser of the absurdly extravagant son et lumiere spectacles at Versailles. Like some exquisite piece of porcelain, Boreades is all display and fancy: the story of a queen obliged by custom to marry a descendant of the West Wind, but abdicating in order to bed someone else - only to find her man was actually a "Boreade" all along. That's 18th-century opera for you: never was an art-form less fazed by coincidence. Monday 7pm
Tickets: a few available, at all prices
TODAY
One Thousand Years of Music in a Day
A millennial gimmick, with two Proms which are meant to illustrate the "1000 Years" but don't at all: not meaningfully, at least. But Holst's Planets suite (BBCSO) this afternoon may be worth catching. 2.30pm & 7.30pm Tickets: available at all prices (pounds 5-20)
MONDAY
See panel, right
TUESDAY
Lili Boulanger's Psalm 130
Barely-known piece by the French composer (sister of Nadia) whose death at 24 made her one of the great what-ifs of modern music. Yan Pascal Tortelier conducts the BBC Philharmonic. 7pm Tickets: available at all prices
Poulenc & Messiaen
An atmospheric chamber concert of war works written under the Occupation in the 1940s. Includes Quartet for the End of Time. 10pm
Tickets: available, all at pounds 9
WEDNESDAY
Peter Maxwell Davies
Premiere of Spinning Jenny - the first of this year's Proms commissions - an orchestrated memory of the cotton mills in Manchester where the composer grew up. 7.30pm
Tickets: only pounds 20 stalls seats left
THURSDAY
Boulez, Ravel & Messiaen
France again, with Jean Rigby as the sultry mezzo in Sheherazade and the BBCSO gearing up to the huge demands (and forces) of Messiaen's last, vast score, clairs sur l'au-dela. 7.30pm
Tickets: available at all prices
FRIDAY
Shostakovich 10th Symphony
Mark Elder takes the LPO through a landmark of modern symphonic writing. Also, Imogen Cooper, that most intelligent and sensitive of pianists, plays Beethoven's Concerto no 3. 7.30pm
Tickets: only pounds 20 stalls & boxes or pounds 5 restricted view seats left
SATURDAY
Blue Peter Prom
Launched last year and designed as a painless, fun-for-all-the-family introduction to orchestral music. 3pm
Tickets: only pounds 10 stalls seats left
Mozart & Haydn
Fresh from his triumphant War and Peace at Spoleto (see review, above), Richard Hickox scales down to conduct the Nelson Mass - written not so much in honour of the British naval hero as awe. 8pm
Tickets: only pounds 20 stalls and pounds 5 restricted view seats left
Ticket information correct at time of going to press. 500 standing tickets are on sale one hour before each performance.
All concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, SW7 (0171 589 8212)
TICKETS FURTHER AHEAD
SOLD OUT
Except for standing tickets on the day, or any members' returns (not 6-11 Sept):
26 July Rautavaara premiere
31 July 100 Years of Film Music
8 Aug Trevor Pinnock/ The English Concert
6 & 7 Sept Simon Rattle/ Vienna Philharmonic
9 Sept Zubin Mehta/ Bavarian State Orchestra
10 Sept Beethoven 9: LSO
11 Sept Last Night
GOING FAST
(Restricted views only)
16 Aug Suk, Brahms & Dvork: Liverpool Phil
24 Aug Shostakovich & Berlioz: Pittsburgh SO
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