Mark Savage
BBC Music correspondent

We return from the interval with a brand new composition – Extra Time, by Hitchin-born musician Iain Farrington.

Farrington is no stranger to the Proms, having previously written pieces including Wing It (2012), a jazz guide to the orchestra; and Beethoveniana (2020), inspired by Beethoven‘s nine symphonies.

This year, he’s been commissioned to write a piece that’s “a celebration of sports as well as famous sporting TV themes”.

Fingers crossed the percussionist gets to wallop the life out of a cowbell for the Test Match Special theme.

Jack Burgess
Live editor

BBC One's TV coverage of tonight's Last Night of the Proms has just been opened with a short sketch from some unexpected famous faces - Match of the Day presenters Gary Lineker, Joe Hart and Danny Murphy.

It's the 60th anniversary of the BBC's long-running football show Match of the Day and Proms presenter Katie Derham says the Proms has marked "an incredible summer of live music and sport" with "a fond musical tribute to all the sporting theme tunes we know and love".

The conductor then walks on to begin the first piece - Iain Farrington's Extra Time- which is a world premiere and BBC commission, opening with the iconic Match of the Day trumpets.

Wimbledon, Test Match Special are all featured and even Ski Sunday makes an appearance.

Here's Joe Hart and Danny Murphy giving their half-time analysis of this year's Proms season:

Rachel Flynn
reporting from the Royal Albert Hall

It can't be easy for the hundreds of Prommers standing throughout the entire performance tonight.

Looks like they're resting their knees as they wait for the second half.

Jack Burgess
Live editor

Here are three more standout pieces from this year's Proms season that you might have missed.

Beethoven's ninth symphony, Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1 and Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive - all absolute bangers.

Catch up with these three short clips:

Rachel Flynn
Live reporter

Classical music isn’t for everybody, and before this summer I’d never stepped foot in a classical concert.

New to London, I decided to give the Proms a go and attended Prom 8: An Orchestral Celebration of Nick Drake, external.

A folk artist praised for his song writing after his death aged 26, his music was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and different vocalists - including his sister Gabrielle.

This kind of programming, Proms Director David Pickard tells me, is what the Proms is all about.

“We've never heard the albums like that. It gives them a different colour and gives people a chance to see an orchestra for the first time,” David adds.

Other non-classical artists to perform at this year’s Proms are indie rock band Florence + The Machine and soul singer Sam Smith.

There is lots of pomp and Beethoven too, but across the dozens of summer concerts there’s likely something you didn’t expect to see in a classical music festival.

Jack Burgess
Live editor

We're into the interval now, which we're expecting to last 25 minutes.

Once the music starts again we'll get to hear a couple of world premieres, both BBC commissions.

First up will be Iain Farrington's Extra Time and we'll also hear Stephen Hough's In His Hands.

There is also going to be a performance of the main theme from The Pink Panther, by Henry Mancini - I can't wait for that.

After that we'll have Ruperto Chapí's Carceleras and Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea-Songs, before a grand conclusion to round off the night, featuring Rule, Britannia!, Pomp and Circumstance, Jerusalem, The National Anthem and Auld Lang Syne.

So don't go anywhere!

Your favourite piece from the first half? Mine has to be Gabriel Faure's Pavane. That was beautiful.

Mark Savage
BBC Music correspondent

It's not part of the programme but Sir Stephen Hough has just returned to the programme to play a fiendishly tricky arrangement of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (which also incorporates elements of Flight of the Bumblebee and Chim Chim Cheree).

Amazing stuff from the virtuoso.

"I hope he travels home by umbrella," jokes tenor Nicky Spence on BBC Two.

Rachel Flynn
reporting from the Royal Albert Hall

Just as everyone gets up to leave for the interval, Sir Stephen Hough returns to play... Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Speaking on BBC Two, tonight's pianist Sir Stephen Hough said that Camille Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No. 5 is "like a little picture postcard" of the composer's travels down the Nile.

He adds that it's "almost like a sketch that he sent back to friends".

"You know, 'I've just been to this amazing place, and here's a musical idea of what it was like," he says.

Mark Savage
BBC Music correspondent

Camille Saint-Saëns composed his last piano concerto in Egypt in the winter of 1895 - 1896.

The music recreates the sound of a sea voyage, with the second movement (heard here tonight) taking us to the Far East.

The melody is derived from an authentic Nubian love song he heard while crossing the Nile on a boat called a dahabiah.

Saint-Saëns claimed to have scribbled the tune on one of his sleeves so as not to forget it.

Keep an ear out for the finale, where the French composer includes impressionistic references to the croaking of frogs and the swoosh of a ship’s propeller.

The final piece of the first half has just started playing in the Royal Albert Hall - French composer Camille Saint-Saëns' Egyptian Andante.

Rachel Flynn
reporting from the Royal Albert Hall

Just as the piano lid was opened for the next piece, we heard a "heave" from the Prommers standing in the arena, and a "ho" from the Prommers up at the gallery.

Something tells me they've done this joke before...

Mark Savage
BBC Music correspondent

Next up, we have a counter-point to the traditional Last Night performance of Sir Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs.

Grace Williams’ work concentrates instead on lullabies and nursery songs she heard growing up in Wales, including Dacw Mam yn Dwâd (Here's Mummy Coming), Si Lwli Mabi (Sleep My Baby) and Gee Geffyl Bach (Gee-up, Little Horse).

Williams claimed that she “tossed it off in an evening”, but it quickly established itself as one her most popular works.

The light-hearted suite received its premiere on a radio broadcast by the BBC Northern Orchestra (now the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra) in 1940 and became an instant hit, providing some much-needed cheer during the dark days of The Blitz.

It was immediately recorded for commercial release by the London Symphony Orchestra and has remained in circulation ever since.

Rachel Flynn
reporting from the Royal Albert Hall

Though audience participation is famously left to the last part of the Last Night, one Prommer is popping confetti after every piece.

They receive a 'woo' from the crowd every time, so I don't think anyone minds.

Others wave their flags as they give their applause. So far I've spotted flags from New Zealand, Finland, Ireland, Ukraine, the EU, and of course, the Union Jack.

Mark Savage
BBC Music correspondent

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Summer Is Gone describes the fading haze of summer and the onset of autumn, using chromatic harmony and decreasing tempos to express the changing of the seasons.

The composer based his work on a poem by Christina Rosetti:

It could just as easily be a farewell to the Proms season.

Mark Savage
BBC Music correspondent

How often have you watched a sporting event and thought, “Hey, that’d make a great orchestral score?”

Me neither – but then, I’m not Charles Ives, a Yale student who watched his collegemates trounce Princeton in a 6-0 defeat one winter’s day in 1897.

The musician compressed the entire match into three minutes, using the notes on the stave to represent the formation that started Yale’s winning drive.

According to the Yale Alumni Magazine, it also “carries a zig-zag trumpet line symbolizing a 55-yard touchdown run; piccolo trills mimicking the referee’s whistle; and trombone flourishes meant to portray the sound of the crowd”.

In some performances, that last element is played by 50 kazoos.

Sadly, that won’t be the case tonight.

Rachel Flynn
reporting from the Royal Albert Hall

Gabriel Fauré's Pavane was the BBC singers' first piece this evening.

Last year was a difficult year for the group - who were targeted by the BBC's budget cuts. But the proposal to cut them sparked a backlash, with 140,000 people signing a petition urging the BBC to reverse its decision.

The decision was reversed, and they could still perform in last year's Proms. It's great to see them back this year too.

Classical music has a habit of popping up in unexpected places.

Earworms written for the concert hall are constantly being transplanted – or transposed – into new contexts, from film to reality TV, dance music to video games.

So which of the works programmed at this year’s BBC Proms have found a new home in contemporary culture?

Take the quiz to find out.

Mark Savage
BBC Music correspondent

In 16th Century Europe, a pavane was a slow processional court dance, which the aristocracy used to showcase fancy ball gown, with plenty of curtsies, retreats and advances.

Imagine Bridgerton without the steamy sex scenes and you’re basically there.

Gabriel Fauré borrowed the form for this piece, originally written for the piano in the late 1880s, then expanded for orchestra and choir, with lyrics about the romantic helplessness of man.

The composer described it as "elegant, but not otherwise important," intending it to be played at a faster tempo than it has generally come to be performed.

But, from the opening pizzicato violins, to the dreamy flute melody and the stately sweeps of the string section, it has become known as “the world's favourite piece of relaxing music”.

Mark Savage
BBC Music correspondent

We have a new work by Grammy-nominated composer Carlos Simon now.

Hellfighters’ Blues is inspired by the life of James Reese Europe, an American bandleader who is considered a major figure in the transition from ragtime to jazz in the early 20th Century.

Born in Alabama, he moved to New York in his early twenties, where he helped to form the Clef Club, a groundbreaking society for Black Americans in the music industry.

In 1912, the club made history by becoming the first band to play jazz at Carnegie Hall.

During World War One, Europe became the bandleader of the Harlem Hellfighters, a regiment made up primarily of black Americans.

Performing for British, French and American military audiences during the war, they are thought to be the first black band to play jazz in Europe.

Simon’s piece honours that legacy by incorporating elements of the 12-bar blues, including, he says, “solos written in the style of those early ragtime players with jubilant blues riffs and jazz shakes”.