The BBC Proms’ annual summertime parade of great concerts is underway in London — and anywhere else with a good internet connection. This week’s highlights include Canadian Jan Lisiecki with Royal Opera conductor Antonio Pappano on Friday.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
Yesterday’s Bastille Day concert was inspired, with François-Xavier Roth leading a survey of “riotous” French dance music from Lully’s incidental music for Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Roth even opened the Lully by banging the floor with a staff, in true period style.
The period instruments used by the Les Siècles orchestra were later swapped for more modern ones to suit the programme. There were two sets of modern instruments — including the exact sort that would have been in common circulation in Paris in 1913. The concert is available for streaming here.
Monday: The early-afternoon (8 a.m. Eastern) chamber music concerts from Cadogan Hall get underway with a mix of Mozart, Ravel and Lutoslawski on piano and and violin. The evening brings Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and conductor Jonathan Nott from Royal Albert Hall, at 2:30 p.m. (Eastern).
These concerts — and there is something every day of the week — are available for on-demand streaming if you miss the live event.
The programmers have gone to great lengths to match conductor and soloist talents with repertoire that judiciously includes new music not in a we-have-to-do-this but in a this-really-means-something way.
Wednesday promises the most emotionally wrenching concert of the week, with composer Thomas Adès and the BBC Symphony premiering a new work inspired by Totentanz, a mural reduced to rubble along with the northern city of Lübeck during World War II. The programme also includes Benjamin Britten’s masterful Sinfonia da Requiem.
And, on Friday, in an early Albert Hall concert (1:30 p.m. Eastern), Jan Lisiecki makes his Proms début with Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto, which he performed with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra last season. On stage with Lisiecki will be the Santa Cecilia Academy Orchestra of Rome with conductor Antonio Pappano, best known for his work in opera.
It’s a great, mainstream symphonic programme, opening with Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony and closing with Sergei Rachmaninov’s Second.
You’ll find all the details for the week here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
