Sakari Oramo conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Last Night of the Proms on Saturday 12 September 2026 at the Royal Albert Hall, with Yuja Wang and Nicky Spence.
The Proms began on 10 August 1895 as Mr Robert Newman’s Promenade Concerts. Newman managed the newly built Queen’s Hall and had a stated plan for it: nightly concerts, popular at first, the standard raised by stages until he had made a public for classical and modern music. Standing cost a shilling, eating and smoking were allowed, and Henry Wood, then twenty-six, conducted the first season and went on conducting for half a century. The concerts moved to the Royal Albert Hall in the war and have been broadcast since 1927.
The Last Night is the one concert of the eight-week season that everyone outside classical music can name. It runs a first half of ordinary programming and a second half of the things the evening exists for, and most of its seats are allocated by ballot months ahead, with any remainder released in July. Wang is the unusual booking: a pianist better known for Rachmaninov than for flags.
Sakari Oramo conducts on Saturday 12 September 2026 at 7.15pm — his seventh Last Night — with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Chorus and Singers, Yuja Wang at the piano and the tenor Nicky Spence. The standing places in the arena and gallery are still sold on the day, from £8, which is Newman’s shilling with a hundred and thirty years of inflation on it and the oldest bargain in London music.