Daniel Barenboim [BBC]

WALKING around the streets of Camden/Islington/Westminster may or may not fill your head with music (as opposed to sirens, trains, planes and the screech of brakes). But generations of composers have tuned in to the experience of London life, and some of the results turn up on August 13 in that evening’s Prom – which is a celebration of the city through the ears of Elgar, Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

The main work is VW’s London Symphony, which strolls in sound through Bloomsbury down to the Embankment, taking note of the Westminster chimes. And though this is a London prior to two world wars – the piece was premiered in 1914 – it’s not hard to make connection with these places as we know them now. Things haven’t changed that much.
Also on the programme is Holst’s Hammersmith Suite (depicting the neighbourhood where he taught for some years at St Paul’s Girls’ School) and Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture: a piece whose name inspires misunderstanding. Nothing to do with mind-altering substances, it’s Victorian slang for salt-of-the-earth Londoners. As in Cockney. The only cracking is of jokes and bones.

• You won’t think of him as a typical Camden resident, but Daniel Barenboim once lived in Hampstead (when he was married to Jacqueline du Pre). These days he’s a world citizen, engaged in world affairs. And on August 11 he brings to the Proms his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which has been running now for a quarter-century as an experiment in co-existence. The players are all either Israeli or Palestinian. And hard-liners who dismiss it as an empty gesture fail to understand its rationale.

As Barenboim has said repeatedly, it makes no pretence of solving anything. It’s not the quick fix Donald Trump imagines himself capable of achieving. It’s just an opportunity to find common ground in music. And doing that effectively is reward enough. At the Prom, it plays Brahms’s Violin Concerto with Anne-Sophie Mutter as soloist. Expect something beyond the ordinary.

• Other Proms highlights this week are the contralto-turned-conductor Nathalie Stutzmann taking Britain’s National Youth Orchestra through Mahler’s 1st Symphony and a new work by Dani Howard that follows a Barenboim-like agenda of coming together in co-existence. That’s August 10. And on August 11 the popular saxophonist Jess Gillam showcases a new concerto by Karl Jenkins, who turned 80 this year. The composer of Adiemus and the Armed Man is still firing on all guns. And this latest piece, called Stravaganza, has reportedly a carnival exuberance, full of life and colour.
All Proms happen at the Albert Hall, with live relay on Radio 3 if you can bear the presenters. Details: bbc.co.uk/proms

• Outside the Proms there’s an interesting collaboration at LSO St Luke’s between members of the London Symphony Orchestra and Tangram: an Anglo-Chinese collective organising performance projects in Britain.

Running two nights, August 9 & 10, is a music and dance piece called Bound/Unbound which follows the life stories of two socially pioneering women in 19th-century China who, among other things, fought against the binding of female feet. Co-composed by Alex Ho and Sun Keting, it’s a sort of East/West fusion score. Panache and spectacle included. Details: lso.co.uk