Proms at St Jude’s often takes place during Pride Month, and tonight − nearly 55 years to the day since the first Pride marches in June 1970, following the 1969 Stonewall Uprising − we celebrate three LGBTQ+ composers and the immense contribution they have made in the history of classical music. Caroline Shaw is the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music and described Entr’acte as ‘like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further; [it] suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition’. American Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is one of the most recognisable pieces of classical music in the world – it was used at Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral and after JFK’s assassination − and Tchaikovsky’s heartfelt Serenade for Strings is considered to be one of the late Romantic era’s definitive compositions.

Nicholas Daniel OBE is one of the world’s great oboists and one of Britain’s best-known musicians. He won the BBC Young Musician of the Year award in 1980 with the Vaughan Williams Oboe Concerto and has made several award-winning recordings of it over the years. Mr Daniel will also perform a second piece by Barber − an oboe Canzonetta − the middle movement of an unfinished concerto, his final work.