BBC Proms: Last Night of the Proms

BBC Proms: Last Night of the Proms

Saturday, 12 September 2020, 8.00pm

In a year like no other, the Last Night of the Proms – always a celebration of world-class music-making across the season – reflects the many experiences and moods we have encountered during the current Covid-19 pandemic.

Finnish maestra Dalia Stasevska – the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor – presides over a specially adapted Last Night with no live spectators at the Royal Albert Hall but with millions listening and watching worldwide.

Excerpts from Mozart’s witty opera celebrating unwavering love leads to Strauss’s rapturous ‘Morgen!’, a wedding gift to his wife, opening with the thought that ‘Tomorrow the sun will shine again’.

There’s consolation in Sibelius’s serene Impromptu, a celebration of one of the great creative spirits of the past century – Stephen Sondheim – in his 90th-brthday year, and there are birds of various hues. Whether in the soaring violin of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, the raucous joy of the Romanian folk song The Skylark or in the birdsong that concludes Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi’s new commission (whose title, Solus, also acknowledges the loneliness of lockdown), these winged songsters express the hope for freedom and renewal.

With rising star Golda Schultz and Proms regular Lisa Batiashvili as soloists – as well as the usual Last Night favourites such as Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem – it’s a jubilant, socially distanced musical party designed to bring us all together.

Live on BBC Radio 3 & BBC One

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Published by The Journal of Music on 7 September 2020

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