Review – BBC Proms 2026: Afterlife – Visions of the Beyond

Programme

L. Boulanger Vieille prière bouddhique
Szymanowski Stabat mater
Messiaen L’Ascension – four symphonic meditations
R. Strauss Death and Transfiguration

Mari Eriksmoen (soprano)
Paula Murrihy (mezzo-soprano)
James Way (tenor)
Szymon Mechliński (baritone)
BBC National Chorus of Wales · London Philharmonic Choir
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Conductor: Ryan Bancroft

Thursday 23 July 2026 · 7.30pm–c9.35pm
Royal Albert Hall

Listen on BBC Radio 3 / BBC Sounds

Review

This is the first of the Proms season I didn’t get prepared for. In writing previews I skipped over Ryan Bancroft’s swansong appearance with the BBC National Orchestra because to do justice to such an evocative programme demanded time. Due diligence demanded time and I ran out of it.

So I skid into this live broadcast totally unprepared and all the more delighted for it. The Proms at its best: when the thing on the page leads you in one direction, and the sounds take you some place else.

This is in part down to Boulanger’s Vieille prière bouddhique. Eery. Unsettling. Mystical. I feel like things are really quite hot. Someone needs to open a window. Maybe I should wear something looser fitting. Like linen, or something. The chorus is far off. I feel like I’m there in the Royal Albert Hall without having to be there. The choral writing when it’s heady and wistful reminds me of Venus in Holst’s The Planets. As a concert opener, it hits the spot. I’m also reassured the presenter – Alex Humphreys – appears to struggle pronouncing the title as I would. That basically means I probably could have been a Radio 3 presenter myself if I’d stuck it out. Maybe.

The chorus is coolly comforting in the opening Stabat mater dolorosa. Baritone Szymon Mechliński has an epic voice. Fierce, but counter-intuitively reassuring. A guiding voice. Skipping a movement to Fac me tecum pie flere, the combined voices of BBC National Chorus of Wales and London Philharmonic Choir create an incredibly tender sound in the opening sequence before the soprano solo – no mean feat. There is a sense of occasion here. Virgo virginum praeclara reminds me just how fresh a listen this is and how valued that is. A quick look at the Proms database reveals there were only three performances before this one – I can see how I missed the first one (1965), and the second (1995). I am slightly embarrassed I missed the third (2009). Come the final Christe cum sit hinc exire, Szymanowski’s setting has a vague sense of positive PR for grief. Harmonically, it doesn’t tie things up neatly in a bow, but somehow finds a way of underscoring the ambivalence about the experience. It is the most rewarding chance discovery. 

Messiaen makes more sense to me now — Turangalîla in Bergen earlier this year taught me to hear the boldness in his language, the way it asserts itself and breaks the rules without apologising, and that’s audible here too, in something as different in tone as L’Ascension. I’m not sure whether this is accurate, but Messiaen seems to outdo Stravinsky without casting shade on him. Once again, I’m thinking of the time in my life when both seemed unnecessarily complicated, weird, and superior. Now there are moments, like this evening in the L’Ascension when it almost feels as though the unusualness is so unusual that it makes perfect sense of those moments, days, weeks and months after when someone has gone and the world tilts. Absence is laid bare. Emotions scream into the void. L’Ascension is the soundtrack I didn’t know I needed and wish I’d known before. I now want to listen to Quartet for the End of Time. I remember hating that as a teenager too.

This review will be updated in due course.

Gallery

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