The one Proms concert that reaches listeners outside classical music, the Last Night brought Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to the Royal Albert Hall, with Yuja Wang and Nicky Spence.
Sakari Oramo conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Last Night of the Proms on Saturday 12 September 2026, closing an eight-week season of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall with Yuja Wang and Nicky Spence as soloists.
The Proms began on 10 August 1895 as Mr Robert Newman’s Promenade Concerts, at the newly built Queen’s Hall: nightly concerts, popular at first, the standard raised by stages until Newman had made a public for classical and modern music. Standing cost a shilling, 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 closes each season. It keeps a first half of concert repertoire and a second half given over to the traditional finale, and like the rest of the series it is carried by the BBC, which has broadcast the Proms for almost a century.
It was Oramo’s seventh Last Night as conductor, with the BBC Symphony Chorus and Singers joining the orchestra and its two soloists. The arena and gallery were left to standing promenaders, the practice that gave Newman’s concerts their name in 1895 and that has survived the move from Queen’s Hall to the Royal Albert Hall and a century of broadcasting.