The Proms returns with a programme of 20th- and 21st-century works. Composer-conductor George Benjamin directs new-music specialists, the London Sinfonietta – celebrating its 50th anniversary this year – in a concert that continues our series marking 100 years since the end of the First World War.

Alongside a quartet of war-themed premieres (co-commissioned with 14–18 NOW), the programme features Stravinsky’s homage to Debussy, the elegant Symphonies of Wind Instruments; Messiaen’s monumental tribute to the dead of both world wars, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, and Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, whose haunting solo trumpet famously raises ‘the perennial question of existence’.