Proms starts on patriotic note

This will be Slatkin's first Proms as BBC chief conductor

The first night of the BBC Proms - which starts on Friday - may not be as famous as the last night, but it tends to provide more challenging musical fare.

The 2001 season starts with three of the biggest guns of British composing - Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar - as well as a world première and a rare marriage of music and poetry by America's John Adams.

Elgar's cello concerto was a response to WWI

The first piece on Friday will be the première of an opening fanfare commissioned by the BBC.

Composed by Colin Matthews, it is intended as a welcome to Leonard Slatkin, conducting his first Prom as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

'Pole position'

Proms director Nicholas Kenyon told BBC News Online, "I'm particularly pleased by the fact that it's the first Proms where Leonard Slatkin has been chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

"He has been to the Proms before, often, but this is the first time he'll have pole position, doing the first night and the last night as well as other concerts in between - he does more concerts than any other conductor," said Kenyon.

Matthews has also orchestrated Britten's Paul Bunyan overture, written while Britten was in a self-imposed exile in North American during the war.

"He was in a great deal of pain for several days - but nevertheless, he woke up one morning and wrote down the opening theme of the Cello Concerto"

Elgar's daughter Carice

A group of leading young singers is to take on Vaughan Williams' Serenade to Music, written for Henry Wood, the original creator of the Proms - then at the Queen's Hall - in 1895.

Elgar's Cello Concerto is one of the most famous pieces of 20th century classical music.

Haunting

Premiered in 1919, it was a mournful response to the first World War which shocked Elgar, as it did so may others, with its carnage and waste.

The haunting melody came to the composer while he was in a London nursing home having his tonsils removed.

"He was in a great deal of pain for several days," his daughter Carice wrote later.

"There was not anything like the sedatives we have now, but nevertheless, he woke up one morning and asked for pencil and paper and wrote down the opening theme of the Cello Concerto."

The concerto is played by cellist Guy Johnston, making his Proms debut after winning the BBC Young Musicians 2000.

Adams: Setting poetic texts to music

The concert will conclude with John Adam's Harmonium, a work which marries his music with poetry from Britain's John Donne and American Emily Dickinson.

Adams, long associated with 'minimalism', is now more accurately perceived as one of the composers who led the way back to more consonant and conventionally 'tonal' work.

Harmonium, as an expression of transatlantic links and the marriage of classical music's future with its past, is set to make a suitable climax to the first concert in the world's greatest music festival.