British conductor John Wilson has long been a Proms favourite, but last year’s debut appearance of his new super-orchestra the Sinfonia of London caused a sensation. ‘Astonishing,’ wrote The Times. For The Spectator, this was ‘an orchestra so thrillingly alive with the sheer glory of it all that hearing them play felt like being a teenager in love’. Now Wilson and the Sinfonia are back, in an all-British programme that pairs much-loved classics by Elgar and Vaughan-Williams with Walton’s kaleidoscopic Partita, Bax’s stirring musical seascape and Huw Watkins’s spirited Flute Concerto, played by its dedicatee Adam Walker.

Happy and glorious: the story of British music is inextricably linked with royalty, and down the centuries composers ranging from Handel and Elgar to Walton, Parry and Vaughan Williams have risen to royal occasions with music of breath-taking pageantry, beauty and power. In the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee year the BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Singers present a celebration of music and royalty in all its splendour: from the music of the Tudor court to Britten’s Coronation opera Gloriana, by way of Handel’s majestic Coronation Anthems, choral music by the current Master of the Queen’s Music Judith Weir, and a specially commissioned new work by Cheryl Frances-Hoad.

Giuseppe Verdi had a complicated relationship with religion: he asked to be buried with just ‘one priest, one candle, one cross’. But as a born dramatist, he knew how to tell a great story – and his colossal Requiem encompasses death, rebirth and the end of the world itself, in music that simply blazes with passion and power. Now, in the vast spaces of the Royal Albert Hall, Sakari Oramo assembles two choruses, a multinational team of solo singers (including 2021 Cardiff Singer of the World Song Prize winner Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha) and the full forces of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and prepares to raise the roof. A truly spectacular First Night of the 2022 BBC Proms.

Celebrating the BBC’s centenary year, the Proms partners with Radio 1 Relax for a late-night wind-down. Relax with Radio 1’s Chillest Show presenter Sian Eleri, who appears onstage to introduce a stripped-back set of collaborations and explorations.

Katie Derham hosts continued live coverage from the Royal Albert Hall, at the climax of the world’s greatest classical music festival. Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova and Australian tenor Stuart Skelton join Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers for a jubilant programme including music by Florence Price, Latin flavours from Piazzolla and Troilo, English folk courtesy of Percy Grainger and, of course, all the traditional favourites including Rule, Britannia, Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem. Katie is joined by special guests Gareth Malone and Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

With his ‘thrilling vocal heroics’ and ‘magnetic stage presence’, Stuart Skelton is one of the great tenors of his generation, a regular in all the major international opera houses. The Australian singer is joined by charismatic Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova for the climax of the 2021 festival – a musical celebration like no other.

Bach’s crowning masterpiece, the St Matthew Passion combines moments of extraordinary fragility and tenderness with raw choral power and explosive jubilation, bitter grief with passages of consolation. With double chorus and orchestra, its scope and ambition is vast – a piece made for the Royal Albert Hall. Following on from their gripping account of Handel’s Theodora in 2018, period-instrument ensemble Arcangelo and Director Jonathan Cohen return to the Proms, joined by a glittering line-up of soloists including Roderick Williams and rising star Stuart Jackson.

The Sinfonia of London makes its much-anticipated official concert debut under John Wilson, who re-established the ensemble in 2018. Following on from their award-winning recording, this orchestral ‘army of generals’ brings with it Korngold’s stirring, filmic Symphony in F sharp. It’s part of a musical bird’s-eye view of 19th- and 20th-century Vienna that also includes the overture to Die Fledermaus and Ravel’s dizzying La valse.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner makes his 60th Proms appearance directing his own Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in Handel’s vividly theatrical Dixit Dominus – a concerto for choir that blazes with virtuosity and colour. It’s paired with Bach’s Easter cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden – a fiery, dramatic setting of Luther’s popular hymn. Mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg is the soloist in the young Handel’s cantata of praise to the Virgin Mary, Donna, che in ciel, containing music the composer later borrowed for his opera Agrippina.

Blending soul, jazz, art-pop and spoken word, singer-songwriter Moses Sumney defies traditional categories. His ever-evolving voice has channelled political rage and emotional optimism into everything from sprawling orchestral tracks to electronica. Here he performs songs from his albums Aromanticism and græ in new orchestral arrangements, masterminded by Jules Buckley.