Organisers of The Proms have organised a new ‘after-hours’ showcase, featuring appearances from St Vincent, Arooj Aftab, The Traitors and more.
New for 2025, the BBC music series will now be hosting a ‘Dark Till Dawn Prom’, which will take place at the historic Royal Albert Hall in London later this year.
Plans for the new event were shared in the programme announcing the summer festival, and it was also confirmed that rock musician St Vincent was lined-up as part of the 2025 bill, as was Pakistani-American singer Arooj Aftab, Grammy award-winner Angelique Kidjo, and one-handed pianist Nicholas McCarthy. St Vincent will be performing for the first time as part of the series on September 3 alongside Jules Buckley and his Orchestra.
Others confirmed for the 2025 edition include Korean sensation Yunchan Lim playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 4., soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, violinist Randall Goosby, and sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar.
Sir Simon Rattle will conduct Chineke! (Europe’s first minority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra) through a performance of the final work by Pulitzer-winning US composer George Walker. Elsewhere, a celebration of film composer Bernard Herrmann is planned, and Claudia Winkleman will host a show that celebrates the tense soundtrack to the hit BBC show The Traitors.
There will be 86 concerts, held across London, Gateshead, Bristol, Bradford, Belfast, Sunderland and more. The all-night event is on August 8 and is planned by organist Anna Lapwood.
“I spend a lot of time at the Albert Hall in the middle of the night, practising, and I find it fascinating that the building is still just running overnight,” she told BBC. “There are always people there – cleaners and security guards – a bit like A Night At The Museum.
“So we talked about how fun it would be to be able to invite people into that space, both physically, but also the abstract space of being in an iconic building in the middle of the night.”
This year’s season will mark the first Proms since the departure of director David Pickard. In his place for 2025 is Hannah Donat (director of artistic planning), who has worked alongside Sam Jackson (controller of BBC Radio 3).
Tickets for the 2025 summer Proms go on sale on May 17 from 8am. Visit here for tickets and more information.
As for St. Vincent, the singer has recently been confirmed as performing on the Woodsies Stage at Glastonbury this June.
Last summer, NME caught St. Vincent’s show at London’s Royal Albert Hall. It earned a four-star review: “Throughout the pulverising 90-minute set, Clark wields her guitar like a weapon and attacks the microphone with a restless urgency.
“Big, cathartic breakdowns teeter on the edge of chaos, but Clark and her four-piece band never let things fall apart completely. It’s gorgeous to watch, but it demands participation as well. With music this charged, there’s simply no standing on the sidelines.”
In another four-star review, this time for her latest album, ‘All Born Screaming’ album, NME wrote: “The album’s front section is thrashing and lacerating – a dispatch from the abyss – as she revels in morbid imagery that speaks to a period in which she was besieged by loss (true to mercurial form, she’s declined to be drawn on specifics). And then something strange happens. With the melted Bond theme ‘Violent Times’, she ushers the listener through a secret door that leads to a mellower vibe.”
