Your guide to period-instrument performances at the BBC Proms 2026
Details of the 2026 edition of the world’s largest classical music festival, the BBC Proms, have been announced, boasting a number of spectacular Baroque & Early Music concerts, featuring some of Europe’s finest period-instrument artists and ensembles.
The 2026 Proms season promises eight weeks of diverse and captivating programmes at the Royal Albert Hall in London and beyond. Among the line-up of major international orchestras, family shows, late-night concerts, and non-classical events (including jazz, soul, and Disney evenings) are seven historically informed-performances from the Early Music world.
Tuesday 21 July sees the first Late Night Prom of the season, featuring charismatic French lutenist Thomas Dunford and his Baroque supergroup Ensemble Jupiter, joining forces with rising star tenor Laurence Kilsby for a programme celebrating the life and work of John Dowland on the 400th anniversary of his death. Later that week (Sunday 26 July) in a late-morning recital, organist of Notre-Dame de Paris, Olivier Latry, puts the Royal Albert Hall’s organ through its paces in arrangements and transcriptions of some of JS Bach’s best-loved works.
In early August, two British period-instrument orchestras are in the spotlight: The Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (part of the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras group) under the baton of Sir Mark Elder in a concert performance of Weber’s only English-language opera, Oberon, in its bicentenary year (Thursday 6 August); and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with American soprano Erin Morley in a musical postcard from 18th-century Vienna (Sunday 9 August), featuring concert arias by Mozart and Haydn’s Nelson Mass.
As the 132nd BBC Proms season draws to a close, a second Late Night Prom on Wednesday 2 September, juxtaposes The Gesualdo Six singing early sacred choral music by Hildegard, Machaut, Josquin and Pérotin with Steve Reich specialists, the Colin Currie Group, in his take on traditional Hebrew Psalms in the deeply moving Tehillim. On Thursday 10 September, Arcangelo and Jonathan Cohen return to the Proms with an exciting team of soloists, including Jeanine De Bique, Hugh Cutting and Nick Pritchard, to perform JS Bach’s monumental Mass in B minor.
Finally, on Friday 12 September, perhaps the most recognisable conductor alive today, Sir Simon Rattle, directs the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and star violinist Isabelle Faust in an all-Schumann programme, featuring music defined by the composer’s final descent into madness and despair.
Season and weekend promming (standing) passes go on sale on Thursday 14 May, with general ticket booking following at 9am on Saturday 16 May. Learn more about Baroque & Early Music at this year’s BBC Proms on our Festival page.