Welcome back to your daily digest of wonderful music taking place at the 2025 BBC Proms. Today (Wednesday 23 July), we get a performance of work from one of classical music's most fascinating and enigmatic characters.
Tonight, it's French Night with the Orchestre National de France. And we begin with Maurice Ravel's shimmering Rapsodie espagnole. This evocative orchestral work truly captures the colour and spirit of Spain through a French lens. With sultry habaneras, hypnotic rhythms, and glittering orchestration, it marked Ravel’s emergence as a master orchestrator. Its exotic allure and meticulous detail reveal his genius for atmosphere and nuance.
Next up, we'll hear the Violin Concerto in G major from Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.
Joseph de Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a virtuoso violinist, composer, and conductor, and one of 18th-century France’s most remarkable figures. Born in Guadeloupe to an enslaved African woman and a French nobleman, he rose to prominence in Parisian musical life, leading orchestras and composing elegant symphonies and concertos. A skilled fencer and abolitionist, his legacy blends artistic brilliance with extraordinary resilience against racial prejudice in Enlightenment Europe.
After the interval, we hear the UK premiere of the Danse mystique by Charlotte Sohy (1887-1955). Sohy's lyrical, impressionist-influenced music was largely overlooked in her lifetime, but is now taking its place in the repertoire, with new recordings of her work by adventurous labels such as La Boîte à Pépites. A student of Louis Vierne and close to Nadia Boulanger, she composed symphonic works, chamber music, and songs. Her expressive, refined style is now enjoying a long-overdue rediscovery and reappraisal.
Wagnerian intensity
Next up is a violin virtuoso work, Ernest Chausson's Poème (1896) for violin and orchestra. Rhapsodic, lyrical and bittersweet, this 15- to 20-minute work blends French elegance with Wagnerian intensity. Inspired by Ivan Turgenev’s 1881 romantic novella The Song of Triumphant Love, it unfolds in a single, dreamlike movement.
The final work is Ravel's La valse (1920). A dazzling, haunting deconstruction of the traditional Viennese waltz, this 12-minute piece begins with swirling elegance before spiralling into chaos. Often interpreted as a reflection on the collapse of old Europe after World War I, it’s both tribute and elegy—sumptuous, ironic, and unmistakably modern.
Who is performing at tonight's Prom?
Tonight's Proms performers are, suitably, the Orchestre National de France, under the baton of Romanian conductor Cristian Măcelaru. The soloist for Chausson's Poème is Randall Goosby. Born in 1996, Goosby is already on a stellar trajectory. Signed as Decca Classics’ youngest violinist at 24, Goosby dazzled early: at age 13 he performed with the New York Philharmonic, and critics applauded his “masterly level of control” and “exquisite tone” in Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata No.3.
Goosby’s debut album Roots (2021) pays tribute to pioneering Black composers—Florence Price, William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge‑Taylor—while his Roots: Deluxe Edition (2024) includes premieres and new commissions, blending heritage and innovation. Known for tone that is elegant yet expressive, Goosby advocates for access and inclusion in classical music and champions repertoire by under‑represented composers.
What time is tonight's Prom?
French Night with the Orchestre National de France gets underway at 6.30pm at the Royal Albert Hall. Tickets cost from £11 to £56.
Pics: Getty Images
