What's On / Proms by Day

A free family concert specially devised to give new and younger audiences a first taste of classical music and a flavour of the music to be heard throughout the season.

There's the young Stravinsky arranging a Chopin waltz for ballerinas, and short pieces by Elgar and Holst, two of the three great British composers who died 75 years ago.

There's 19-year-old violinist Jennifer Pike, one of the current crop of Radio 3's New Generation Artists, in a rarity by Holst and a showpiece by Saint-Saëns.

And there's still no better introduction to the instruments of the orchestra than Britten's wonderful set of variations on a tune by Purcell, whose 350th anniversary we're celebrating this year. Plus there's a newly devised work, based on Britten's piece, designed for the BBC Proms Family Orchestra (which gives its debut performance at a Proms concert), and a new set of orchestral variations by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett based on a famous Irish tune first published by Purcell.

Concluding our weekend marking the 75th anniversaries of the deaths of Delius, Elgar and Holst, David Atherton conducts the first Proms performance of Holst's ecstatic choral setting of poems by Keats.

Delius's Brigg Fair took an old Lincolnshire folk song and distilled it into the very essence of nostalgia for England's idyllic rural past, while Elgar took the very essence of friendship and poured it into a dazzlingly inventive set of variations whose 1899 premiere transformed him overnight into England's foremost composer and turned 'Nimrod' into practically an alternative national anthem. Susan Gritton returns later this season as the seductive Dalila in Handel's Samson (Prom 47).