Review: BBC Proms – Fanfare for the Common Man
Style: Modern classical, progressive rock, jazz fusion
Featuring music from: King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Renaissance, Genesis, The Moody Blues, Yes, Soft Machine, Van der Graaf Generator, Frank Zappa, Gentle Giant, Focus, The Incredible String Band, Obisia, Supertramp, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Country: UK
Release date: 18 July 2026
If that title made no sense to you and you’re wondering ‘what’s all this then?’, the short answer is: the Brits are at it again. The BBC Proms is an annual eight-week-long summer festival of classical music concerts played live, predominantly at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The tradition dates back to 1895, and the BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster, took over administration and broadcast of the Proms from 1927. Every year, performances of great classical works, from Holst’s Planets Suite to Beethoven’s Fifth, are conducted. But the Proms also has a creative, playful side and has previously played host to a ukulele orchestra cover of “Teenage Dirtbag” by Wheatus, and a performance of “A Grand, Grand Overture”, a satirical jab at Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, featuring three vacuum cleaners, four rifles, and Sir David Attenborough playing the floor polisher.
For the 2026 Proms, one of the most vaunted new shows is Fanfare for the Common Man, a selection of orchestral interpretations of prog rock classics curated by radio broadcaster Stuart Maconie. The title derives from the opening piece, a composition by American composer Aaron Copland which was interpolated and extended by Emerson, Lake & Palmer on Works: Volume 1 (1977). A full programme is available at the end of the review, and I’ll embed some Instagram links for a taste of the concert (the BBC aren’t big on sharing internationally). Over the course of two hours, The BBC Concert Orchestra1 performs a medley of prog rock classics and hidden gems under conductor Robert Ames, with featured singers Guy Garvey (Elbow), Jane Weaver, Gruff Rhys, Vanessa Haynes, and The Staves.
Upfront I want to make something clear: I think it’s really quite wonderful that an august institution like the BBC Proms is open to preparing a two-hour concert celebrating progressive rock. There are critiques to come, but they should all be understood in the context of my belief that this is a wonderful idea and I’m very glad it came to fruition. And on the whole, Fanfare for the Common Man is a beautifully performed and curated selection, featuring something for every classic prog rock fan, from staples like “The Great Gig in the Sky” and “Nights in White Satin” to unexpected deep cuts from British Afro-rock group Osibisa and Scottish flower power outfit The Incredible String Band. Highlights include but are by no means limited to the opening number with the great Carl Palmer, last surviving member of ELP on drums, a rewarding sax-led performance of Soft Machine’s “Out-bloody-rageous Part 1”2, an orchestral version of “Tubular Bells Part One”, and a Gentle Giant performance which throws the polyphonic vocals to the various orchestra sections forming a sonic tapestry so rich that it could be an original symphony movement. It’s perhaps telling that the highlights are often found in pieces that drew heavily from classical and jazz traditions in the first place.
The flipside of this self-assurity for the classical is that the rock side often lacks that confidence. I’ll lay a little of this at the door of a live mix which knows what to do with opera baritones and sopranos belting it out but is less well-versed in meeker pop singers. Guy Garvey offers the strongest performance, belting for the King Crimson medley and hamming it up with the megaphone for “21st Century Schizoid Man”. Jane Weaver offers strong performances of “Northern Lights” and “Nights in White Satin”, among others, but the softness of her performance, as well as those of Gruff Rhys and The Staves, are too timid in the mix to have much of an impact—even the epic aaaahh chorus of “In the Court of the Crimson King” (performed by Garvey, Weaver, Rhys, and The Staves) is quiet against the incandescence of the orchestra. Not so for Peter Hammill, seventy-seven-year-old singer for Van der Graaf Generator, who takes the stage for the band’s biggest hit “Refugees”. While his register is closer to Robert Smith’s these days, he still has the passion; he can hit the notes, and it makes for a standout performance. But the boldness of this performance also highlights the strangeness of the session singers being so underserved in the production compared to Hammill.
The same applies for the rock instruments. While Carl Palmer performs for two of the ELP pieces—and, at seventy-six, performs with the energy and groove of a man fifty years younger— the session players leave much to be desired. Moments when you can see the session guitarist squinting at his sheet music and fretting licks with all the liveliness of a doctor’s waiting room seem so antithetical to the spirit of the music. The meticulousness of the session guitarists and drummers robs their performances of feeling3. At the end of the day, Hammill and Palmer have a lot more invested in their songs than any of the other performers, and it shows. Meanwhile, when Garvey, Weaver and The Staves are all awkwardly jammed at the front of the stage for “In the Court of the Crimson King”, they look like entertainers at a holiday camp. It’s a small quibble, but the singers don’t even look like part of the orchestra onstage, and this sense of separation runs all the way to the mix.
But my main gripe (there’s more?!) is with the interpretations at large. Interpreting Renaissance and Gentle Giant for orchestra isn’t much of a challenge because they have such a grounding in the traditions of classical music, but at least you’re guaranteed a transfixing composition. At the same time, when an existing song already had orchestral backing, such as the ballad “Maker of Islands” by The Incredible String Band, the orchestra have no heavy-lifting to do. It makes intuitive sense that highlights of the concert would include “Tubular Bells”, “On Reflection”, “Fanfare for the Common Man”, and King Crimson. Even so, when you get to “In the Court of the Crimson King” only to have fifty orchestral musicians wall-of-sound the main riff, you can’t help but think an opportunity has been missed. When the orchestra have to work with riffs, they largely operate like a cover band rather than adding layers of texture and putting a truly symphonic spin on the songs. To some degree, I can understand the bind that the arrangers are in; after all, they wouldn’t want to upset the fans and the prog snobs. But it’s always much more interesting to see an artist make a cover their own than stick close to the original. And much of the time, the orchestra do get to sink their teeth into the compositions. It’s on the big names that they tend to hold back, meaning that titans like Yes and Genesis end up being less exciting parts of the concert.
All of this I say as a lover of modern orchestral progressive rock and metal. We’re living in a golden age of classical/prog metal fusion. Whether it’s synthesised but creative work from the likes of Wilderun or Fleshgod Apocalypse, bands with a permanent string presence (Meer, Bent Knee), composers fusing classical with prog metal (Harry Stafylakis), or the ambition of recent metal symphonies from Devin Townsend and Einar Solberg, there’s a huge amount of symphonic creativity in modern prog. String musicians like Raphael Weinroth-Browne and Chris Baum (Bent Knee) have outsized influence in the scene, working with myriad artists on orchestral arrangements. A prog rock tribute by classical musicians for a state broadcaster doesn’t know this, of course. With a setlist that runs from 1966 to 1978, there’s an almost funereal sense of tribute to a long-dead genre. Music scenes in the internet age, however, do not and cannot dominate largely manipulated music charts. Instead, they thrive in very specific corners, like coral reefs in a seemingly empty ocean. Progressive music is alive and well, and it offers a wealth of treasures for any listener willing to do a bit of hard work (or you can let sites like ours do some of the work for you).
Don’t let my pedantic criticisms dissuade you. All my nitpicking comes from someone who would love to see an ambitious project like this revisited and revised with an eye to sorting out the kinks and achieving its full potential. By and large, Fanfare for the Common Man is still a satisfying musical spectacle and a moving tribute to a genre that often receives little fanfare in the mainstream. If you’re able to find it online (I leave the methods with you4), I’d highly recommend watching and seeing for yourself.
UK residents can watch Fanfare for the Common Man on BBC iPlayer.
Programme5
“Fanfare for the Common Man” Aaron Copland arr. ELP, orch. Robert Ames (Emerson, Lake and Palmer single 1977)
“I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)” orch. Sam Gale (Genesis single 1974)
“Northern Lights” orch. Christian Balvig (Renaissance single 1978)
“Nights in White Satin” orch. Fiona Brice (The Moody Blues single 1967)
“Out-Bloody-Rageous – Part 1” orch. Sam Gale (Soft Machine Third 1970)
“Refugees” orch. Adam Dennis (Van der Graaf Generator The Least we Can Do is Wave to Each Other 1970)
“And You and I” orch. Peter Riley (Yes Close to the Edge 1972)
“Tubular Bells Part One (excerpt)” orch. Adam Dennis (Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells 1973) with the voice of Matt Berry
“Karn Evil 9: First Impression Part 2” orch. Chester Tribley/Bronte Tucker (Emerson, Lake and Palmer Brain Salad Surgery 1973) with original vocals recorded by Greg Lake
“Sylvia” orch. Christian Balvig (Focus single 1972)
“Komfo (High Priest)” orch. Christian Balvig (Osibisa Osibirock 1974)
“Peaches en Regalia” orch. Christian Balvig (Frank Zappa Hot Rats 1969)
“21st Century Schizoid Man” – “I Talk to the Wind” – “The Court of the Crimson King” orch. Fiona Brice (King Crimson In the Court of the Crimson King 1969)
“Entangled” orch. Fiona Brice (Genesis A Trick of the Tale 1976)
“On Reflection” orch. Sam Gale (Gentle Giant Free Hand 1975)
“Maker of Islands” orch. Christian Balvig (The Incredible String Band Hard Rope & Silken Twine 1974)
“The Great Gig in the Sky” orch. Fiona Brice (Pink Floyd The Dark Side of the Moon 1973)
“Crime of the Century” orch. Christian Balvig (Supertramp Crime of the Century 1974)
“Pictures at an Exhibition – The Great Gate of Kyiv Modest Mussorgsky” arr. Keith Emerson, orch. Robert Ames (Emerson, Lake and Palmer Pictures at an Exhibition 1971
- The BBC has five orchestras and the Concert Orchestra is the only one that isn’t a full orchestra, with fifty players. They’re known for playing a mix of classical music, light music and pop. ↩︎
- As Maconie points out, Soft Machine were the first prog rock band to play the Proms, performing in 1970. ↩︎
- Music YouTuber Adam Neely once put forward a theory that drummers and guitarists in classical sound slightly out of place with an orchestra because they have much smaller transients than orchestral instruments (particularly woodwinds). In layman’s terms: guitar and drums produce sharp, quick sounds, whereas the blowing or bowing of a woodwind or string instrument has a longer interval between action and sound—mere microseconds, of course, but enough to produce a noticeable effect. ↩︎
- I won’t link them but I have seen people upload the full concert to YouTube. ↩︎
- The original programme also includes a credit for Jethro Tull’s “Living in the Past” but this doesn’t seem to have made it to the final performance so I’ve taken it out. ↩︎
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