The ultimate guide to the must-see concerts at the 2024 Proms

Time was – not so long ago – when everyone knew what the BBC Proms were for. Prom 35, 15 Aug: Jazz Medley This concert will celebrate 100 years of American jazz, starting with Ellington’s sultry Mood Indigo and Sophisticated Lady, and ending with a piece by the self-styled “trans-idiomatic composer” Anthony Braxton; the European premiere of the great pianist Mary Lou Williams’s Zodiac Suite – composed 80 years ago – sandwiched in between. Prom 45, 24 Aug: Mahler sung by Jamie Barton open image in gallery Dalia Stasevska leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a rare performance of a work by Julius Eastman Sibelius’s majestic Fifth Symphony will send us out into the night after two works about love, loneliness, and withdrawal by very differing composers. Prom 51, 28 Aug: Tinariwen open image in gallery Tinariwen bring haunting desert blues to the Albert Hall Late Proms don’t usually fill the auditorium, but this charismatic group of Tuareg exiles should do so when they bring their haunting desert blues to the Albert Hall. Prom 71, 12 Sept: Sir Andras Schiff open image in gallery The great, and uncompromising, Andras Schiff will play a wonderful musical labyrinth by Bach Classical music by one pair of hands, on an unamplified piano, for an audience of 5,200 in a vast, cavernous space: a recipe for an empty hall?