Friday 05 September 2025 at 7:30pm - 11:30pm

Chineke!

Royal Albert Hall

BBC Proms presents: Rattle Conducts Chineke!

Experience the ‘electric atmosphere’ of a performance by the Chineke! Orchestra – Europe’s first minority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra. Conducted for the first time by Sir Simon Rattle, together they perform Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony: over 50 minutes of brutality, violence, despair and terror, followed by two minutes of triumph. A portrait of life – and death – in Stalin’s Russia, it’s a fierce act of musical testimony.

Bearing witness is also central to Pulitzer-winner George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5, a work ‘suffused with anger’, raging against the 2015 Charleston church massacre. The Prom opens with the steady thrum of Coleridge-Taylor’s orchestral dance The Bamboula. 

Broadcast on BBC Four and BBC iPlayer

Programme

S. Coleridge-Taylor The Bamboula 10’

Walker Sinfonia No. 5, ‘Visions’ 17’

Interval

Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 in E minor 57'

Chineke! Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle conductor