Live From The Barbican In London [Radio 3 Live In Concert]

Benjamin Grosvenor and the BBC SO play Britten's Piano Concerto, Elgar's First Symphony and a new work by Anna Clyne.

Anna Clyne: Night Ferry (UK Premiere)

Britten: Piano Concerto

Benjamin Grosvenor, piano

Andrew Litton, conductor

Two leading lights in a new generation of British artists grace this evening: Benjamin Grosvenor, in 2011 the youngest soloist ever to open the Proms, performs Britten's brilliant, youthful Piano Concerto, while composer Anna Clyne, whose dazzlingly inventive Rewind was such a hit for the BBC SO, returns with a major new work commissioned by the Chicago SO, Night Ferry. The transatlantic theme continues when well-loved American champion of British music, Andrew Litton takes on Elgar's monumental First Symphony. Widely hailed as 'the first great English symphony', this rich and poetic work is a complex weave of nobility, aching sadness and, in the composer's words, 'massive hope'.

Andrew Litton conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Anna Clyne and Britten.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Ian Skelly.

Jiri Belohlavek and the BBC Symphony Orchestra are joined by Isabelle Faust for Brahms's Violin Concerto and by the BBC Symphony Chorus in Suk's The Ripening.

The final concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's season sees their outgoing Chief Conductor Jiri Belohlavek in a wonderful programme of romantic music. Brahms's virtuosic violin concerto comes to life in the hands of German violinist Isabelle Faust. Josef Suk's The Ripening portrays 'the joys and tragic shadows of life' and at the end brings in a wordless female chorus to sing a 'hymn of affirmation'.

Brahms: Violin Concerto

8.10 Interval: Twenty Minutes - see separate billing

Suk: The Ripening Op. 34

Isabelle Faust (violin)

Jiri Belohlavek (conductor).

BBC SO under Jiri Belohlavek with soloist Isabelle Faust in Brahms: Violin Concerto.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Ilan Volkov conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two new works by Dieter Schnebel and David Sawer, alongside Schubert's 9th Symphony.

Dieter Schnebel: Schubert Fantasia (UK Premiere)

David Sawer: Flesh and Blood (BBC Commission, World Premiere)

Christine Rice (mezzo)

Marcus Farnsworth (baritone)

Ilan Volkov (conductor)

Theatre is at the heart of David Sawer's incisive and original music, and his new commission Flesh and Blood is a dramatic scena featuring star British singers Christine Rice and Marcus Farnsworth. Dieter Schnebel's Schubert Fantasia, which opens the concert, recalls dreamlike fragments from Schubert's G major Piano Sonata refracted through a shimmering haze of dissonant harmonies. 150 years earlier, Schubert wrote his 'Great' Ninth Symphony, a powerful feat of sustained momentum, driven by buoyant rhythms, explosive emotions and vast, inexorable climaxes, conducted by the visionary Ilan Volkov.

Ilan Volkov conducts the BBC SO in new works by Dieter Schnebel and David Sawer.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Live from the Barbican Centre, London

Elgar: Overture 'Cockaigne' (In London Town)

Qigang Chen: Reflet d'un temps disparu (London premiere)

Li-Wei Qin (cello)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Long Yu (conductor)

London is the theme for this lively evening, beginning with Elgar's scintillating overture and ending with Haydn's final symphony, written during his last stay in our capital city. Blazing with wit, craft and earthiness, it captures the essence of the composer. The city is conjured up again by Hong-Kong born Raymond Yiu, already acclaimed for his intricate blend of Western and Eastern sonorities. He describes his piece 'The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured', which takes its title from an 18th century pamphlet about madhouses, as a 'symphonic game' which takes its musical cues from Elgar's Cockaigne Overture and the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons'. Cellist Li-Wei Qin joins the BBC Symphony Orchestra to perform a new work by Chinese-French composer Qigang Chen. To conduct the concert is Long Yu, Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, making his debut with the orchestra.

Long Yu conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Elgar and Qigang Chen.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Live from the Barbican Centre, London

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Jonathan Lloyd: Old Racket (World Premiere)

Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1

Stephen Hough (piano)

Sir Andrew Davis (conductor)

Jonathan Lloyd's RPS commission Old Racket is a new work for strings and a companion piece to New Balls for wind and brass, which will receive its world premiere later in the BBC Symphony Orchestra's current season. Sir Andrew Davis is then joined by the BBCSO's Artist in Focus, Stephen Hough, to perform Brahms's tumultuous First Piano Concerto. Hough has written of the 'burst of utter, natural, divine genius' that propels this concerto, 'its flame flares with such intensity, and such promise of more to come, that I find myself overwhelmed by it.' This will be followed by the presentation by Sir Andrew of the prestigious Leslie Boosey Award for outstanding contribution to the furthering of contemporary music in Britain to the music publisher Sally Groves. As part of the BBCSO's Tippett retrospective, the concert concludes with his fourth and final symphony, which follows a life-cycle from birth to death in a single movement, complete with breathing effects; an astonishing example of the imaginative vitality of the composer's late years.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra performs music by Jonathan Lloyd and Brahms.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Thomas Dausgaard conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Prokofiev and Bloch, alongside Nielsen's Symphony No 4, known as 'The Inextinguishable

Prokofiev: Scythian Suite

Bloch: Schelomo

Jian Wang (cello)

Thomas Dausgaard (conductor)

Thomas Dausgaard conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Prokofiev and Bloch's Schelomo for cello and orchestra, alongside Nielsen's Symphony No 4, known as 'The Inextinguishable'.

An invigorating programme explodes into life with Prokofiev's wild Scythian Suite. Ernest Bloch's heart-rending appeal to peace, Schelomo, given voice here by the distinguished Chinese-born cellist Jian Wang, is answered by Carl Nielsen's thrilling Fourth Symphony, 'The Inextinguishable', in which the human spirit battles for a future. As he wrote after the outbreak of the First World War, 'I have an idea for a duel between two sets of timpani, it has to do with war.' It is one of the riveting moments in the symphony, bursting into the finale and developing into a reckless tour de force that resolves into radiant optimism. Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard returns to the helm of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Thomas Dausgaard conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Prokofiev and Bloch.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

The BBC Symphony Orchestra continues its Sibelius Cycle with Symphony No 2 & En Saga. Plus Lithuanian Balys Dvarionas's neo-Romantic Violin Concerto. Thomas Sondergard conducts.

As the BBC Symphony Orchestra reaches the fifth instalment of its acclaimed Sibelius symphony cycle this season, tonight's programme places one of the composer's most popular symphonies, the Second, alongside his shimmering symphonic poem En saga ('A Fairy Tale'). Replacing an indisposed Neeme Jarvi at short notice is Danish conductor Thomas Sondergard, who this autumn takes up a new position as Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Lithuanian Balys Dvarionas's richly neo-Romantic Violin Concerto - of which tonight's soloist Vadim Gluzman is a particular champion - reflects the lyricism and folklike charm of Sibelius - whose Second Symphony was promptly taken up, rightly or wrongly, as an expression of Finnish national pride.

Sibelius: En Saga Op.9

Dvarionas: Violin Concerto UK premiere

Vadim Gluzman (violin)

Thomas Sondergard (conductor).

Thomas Sondergard conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius and Balys Dvarionas.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Mark Simpson: A mirror-fragment

Beethoven: Violin Concerto

Simone Lamsma (violin)

Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Mark Simpson is a multi-talented BBC New Generation Artist - both a spectacular clarinettist and a composer creating unique soundworlds. The BBC Symphony Orchestra opened the 2012 Last Night of the Proms with his work, Sparks, and tonight they give the London Premiere of his richly imagined tone-poem A mirror-fragment. The young Dutch star Simone Lamsma is then the soloist in Beethoven's great Violin Concerto. Sir Michael Tippett found inspiration for the Promethean energy and structural force of his Second Symphony in Beethoven's music: the vigorously assertive opening Allegro, and balletic curlicues of the scherzo-like Presto owe much to his hero's example, while the mosaic-like orchestration of the slow movement hint at the shimmering orchestral tapestries Tippett was to explore later in his career. Martyn Brabbins conducts this latest instalment in the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Tippett retrospective.

Martyn Brabbins leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Mark Simpson and Beethoven

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in an all Stravinsky programme.

The premiere of Stravinsky's seminal ballet score The Rite of Spring famously caused a riot at its 1913 premiere in Paris thanks to its innovative and dissonant harmonies. The great impresario Sergei Diaghilev who had commissioned the score is reported to have said that the scandal was 'exactly what I wanted', and the work has remained one of the composers most often performed scores ever since. Fourteen years later Paris also saw the premiere of the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, based on Sophocles' tragedy in which Oedipus inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother. When he realises his mistake he is so distraught that he gouges out his own eyes. With a libretto by Jean Cocteau, the work also features a narration - tonight performed by Simon Callow.

Stravinsky: Rite of Spring

Jocasta.....Zlata Bulycheva (mezzo soprano)

Oedipus.....Sergei Semishkur (tenor)

Creon.....Ilya Bannik (baritone)

Tiresias.....Alexei Tanovitsky (bass)

Shepherd.....Alexander Timchenko (tenor)

Simon Callow (narrator)

Gentlemen of the London Symphony Chorus

Valery Gergiev (conductor).

Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Martin Handley

The pianist Angela Hewitt collaborates with the Britten Sinfonia, directing from the keyboard. In this concert she performs two of Beethoven's famed piano concertos: his youthful second, and intimate and serene fourth, a pillar of the piano concerto repertoire.

Alongside the two concertos, violinist Thomas Gould directs the orchestra in Wagner's birthday present to his wife Cosima, and Sibelius' ethereal Scene with Cranes, composed as incidental music to a play.

Wagner: Siegfried Idyll

Beethoven: Piano concerto no.2

Angela Hewitt (piano/director)

Thomas Gould (violin/director)

Britten Sinfonia, Thomas Gould (violin) and Angela Hewitt (piano) in Wagner and Beethoven.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Live from The Barbican Centre, London.

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Walton: Overture 'Scapino

York Bowen: Viola Concerto

Lawrence Power (viola)

Rosie Aldridge (mezzo-soprano)

Neal Davies (baritone)

BBC Symphony Chorus

John Wilson (conductor)

John Wilson returns to the BBC Symphony Orchestra to conduct an all-English programme. Lawrence Power has proved a persuasive champion of York Bowen's gloriously romantic Viola Concerto, written for Lionel Tertis in 1908, and this provides the emotional core for a concert lit with ribald humour. Walton's ingenious 'comedy overture' Scapino, an exhilarating orchestral showpiece, finds a spirited echo in Vaughan Williams's earthy Five Tudor Portraits. Setting texts by Henry VIII's one-time tutor John Skelton, Vaughan Williams conjures up fives vivid character sketches, from the drunken Elinor Rumming to the charming Pretty Bess, a scherzo for the tattered Jolly Rutterkin, and Jane Scroop's heartfelt Requiem to her pet sparrow.

John Wilson conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Walton and York Bowen.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Benjamin Grosvenor and the BBC SO play Britten's Piano Concerto, Elgar's First Symphony & a new work by Anna Clyne.

Anna Clyne: Night Ferry UK Premiere

Britten: Piano Concerto

Elgar: Symphony No. 1 in A flat major

Benjamin Grosvenor, piano

Andrew Litton, conductor

Two leading lights in a new generation of British artists grace this evening: Benjamin Grosvenor, the youngest soloist ever to open the Proms in 2011, performs Britten's brilliant, youthful piano concerto, while composer Anna Clyne, whose dazzlingly inventive rewind was such a hit for the BBC SO, returns with a major new work commissioned by the Chicago SO, Night Ferry. The Transatlantic theme continues when well-loved American champion of British music, Andrew Litton takes on Elgar's monumental First Symphony. Widely hailed as 'the first great English symphony', this rich and poetic work is a complex weave of nobility, aching sadness and, in the composer's words.

Andrew Litton conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Elgar's Symphony No 1.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Thomas Dausgaard conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Prokofiev and Bloch, alongside Nielsen's Symphony No 4, known as 'The Inextinguishable

Nielsen: Symphony No 4, 'The Inextinguishable

Jian Wang (cello)

Thomas Dausgaard (conductor)

Thomas Dausgaard conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Prokofiev and Bloch's Schelomo for cello and orchestra, alongside Nielsen's Symphony No 4, known as 'The Inextinguishable'.

An invigorating programme explodes into life with Prokofiev's wild Scythian Suite. Ernest Bloch's heart-rending appeal to peace, Schelomo, given voice here by the distinguished Chinese-born cellist Jian Wang, is answered by Carl Nielsen's thrilling Fourth Symphony, 'The Inextinguishable', in which the human spirit battles for a future. As he wrote after the outbreak of the First World War, 'I have an idea for a duel between two sets of timpani, it has to do with war.' It is one of the riveting moments in the symphony, bursting into the finale and developing into a reckless tour de force that resolves into radiant optimism. Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard returns to the helm of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

BBC Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard in Nielsen: Symphony No 3 (Inextinguishable)

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in an all Stravinsky programme.

The premiere of Stravinsky's seminal ballet score The Rite of Spring famously caused a riot at its 1913 premiere in Paris thanks to its innovative and dissonant harmonies. The great impresario Sergei Diaghilev who had commissioned the score is reported to have said that the scandal was 'exactly what I wanted', and the work has remained one of the composers most often performed scores ever since. Fourteen years later Paris also saw the premiere of the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, based on Sophocles' tragedy in which Oedipus inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother. When he realises his mistake he is so distraught that he gouges out his own eyes. With a libretto by Jean Cocteau, the work also features a narration - tonight performed by Simon Callow.

Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex

Jocasta.....Zlata Bulycheva (mezzo soprano)

Oedipus.....Sergei Semishkur (tenor)

Creon.....Ilya Bannik (baritone)

Tiresias.....Alexei Tanovitsky (bass)

Shepherd.....Alexander Timchenko (tenor)

Simon Callow (narrator)

Gentlemen of the London Symphony Chorus

Valery Gergiev (conductor).

Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Live from the Barbican Centre, London

Raymond Yiu: The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured (World premiere)

Haydn: Symphony No. 104 in D, 'London

Li-Wei Qin (cello)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Long Yu (conductor)

London is the theme for this lively evening, beginning with Elgar's scintillating overture and ending with Haydn's final symphony, written during his last stay in our capital city. Blazing with wit, craft and earthiness, it captures the essence of the composer. The city is conjured up again by Hong-Kong born Raymond Yiu, already acclaimed for his intricate blend of Western and Eastern sonorities. He describes his piece 'The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured', which takes its title from an 18th century pamphlet about madhouses, as a 'symphonic game' which takes its musical cues from Elgar's Cockaigne Overture and the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons'. Cellist Li-Wei Qin joins the BBC Symphony Orchestra to perform a new work by Chinese-French composer Qigang Chen. To conduct the concert is Long Yu, Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, making his debut with the orchestra.

Long Yu conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in music by Raymond Yiu and Haydn.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Ilan Volkov conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two new works by Dieter Schnebel and David Sawer, alongside Schubert's 9th Symphony.

Schubert: Symphony No 9 in C major

Christine Rice (mezzo)

Marcus Farnsworth (baritone)

Ilan Volkov (conductor)

Theatre is at the heart of David Sawer's incisive and original music, and his new commission Flesh and Blood is a dramatic scena featuring star British singers Christine Rice and Marcus Farnsworth. Dieter Schnebel's Schubert Fantasia, which opens the concert, recalls dreamlike fragments from Schubert's G major Piano Sonata refracted through a shimmering haze of dissonant harmonies. 150 years earlier, Schubert wrote his 'Great' Ninth Symphony, a powerful feat of sustained momentum, driven by buoyant rhythms, explosive emotions and vast, inexorable climaxes, conducted by the visionary Ilan Volkov.

Ilan Volkov conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Schubert's Symphony No 9 in C (Great).

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

The BBC Symphony Orchestra continues its Sibelius Cycle with Symphony No 2 & En Saga. Plus Lithuanian Balys Dvarionas's neo-Romantic Violin Concerto. Thomas Sondergard conducts.

As the BBC Symphony Orchestra reaches the fifth instalment of its acclaimed Sibelius symphony cycle this season, tonight's programme places one of the composer's most popular symphonies, the Second, alongside his shimmering symphonic poem En saga ('A Fairy Tale'). Replacing an indisposed Neeme Jarvi at short notice is Danish conductor Thomas Sondergard, who this autumn takes up a new position as Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Lithuanian Balys Dvarionas's richly neo-Romantic Violin Concerto - of which tonight's soloist Vadim Gluzman is a particular champion - reflects the lyricism and folklike charm of Sibelius - whose Second Symphony was promptly taken up, rightly or wrongly, as an expression of Finnish national pride.

Sibelius: Symphony No. 2

Vadim Gluzman (violin)

Thomas Sondergard (conductor).

Thomas Sondergard conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius's Symphony No 2 in D.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Martin Handley

The pianist Angela Hewitt collaborates with the Britten Sinfonia, directing from the keyboard. In this concert she performs two of Beethoven's famed piano concertos: his youthful second, and intimate and serene fourth, a pillar of the piano concerto repertoire.

Alongside the two concertos, violinist Thomas Gould directs the orchestra in Wagner's birthday present to his wife Cosima, and Sibelius' ethereal Scene with Cranes, composed as incidental music to a play.

Sibelius: Scene with Cranes

Beethoven: Piano concerto no.4

Angela Hewitt (piano/director)

Thomas Gould (violin/director)

Britten Sinfonia, Thomas Gould (violin) and Angela Hewitt (piano) in Sibelius, Beethoven.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Presented by Martin Handley

Jiri Belohlavek and the BBC Symphony Orchestra are joined by Isabelle Faust for Brahms's Violin Concerto and by the BBC Symphony Chorus in Suk's The Ripening.

The final concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's season sees their outgoing Chief Conductor Jiri Belohlavek in a wonderful programme of romantic music. Brahms's virtuosic violin concerto comes to life in the hands of German violinist Isabelle Faust. Josef Suk's The Ripening portrays 'the joys and tragic shadows of life' and at the end brings in a wordless female chorus to sing a 'hymn of affirmation'.

Suk: The Ripening Op. 34

Isabelle Faust (violin)

Jiri Belohlavek (conductor).

Jiri Belohlavek leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Josef Suk's The Ripening.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Live from the Barbican Centre, London

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Jonathan Lloyd: Old Racket (World Premiere)

Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1

Tippett: Symphony No 4

Stephen Hough (piano)

Sir Andrew Davis (conductor)

Jonathan Lloyd's RPS commission Old Racket is a new work for strings and a companion piece to New Balls for wind and brass, which will receive its world premiere later in the BBC Symphony Orchestra's current season. Sir Andrew Davis is then joined by the BBCSO's Artist in Focus, Stephen Hough, to perform Brahms's tumultuous First Piano Concerto. Hough has written of the 'burst of utter, natural, divine genius' that propels this concerto, 'its flame flares with such intensity, and such promise of more to come, that I find myself overwhelmed by it.' This will be followed by the presentation by Sir Andrew of the prestigious Leslie Boosey Award for outstanding contribution to the furthering of contemporary music in Britain to the music publisher Sally Groves. As part of the BBCSO's Tippett retrospective, the concert concludes with his fourth and final symphony, which follows a life-cycle from birth to death in a single movement, complete with breathing effects; an astonishing example of the imaginative vitality of the composer's late years.

Sir Andrew Davis continues the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Tippett Symphony Cycle.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Tippett: Symphony No 2

Simone Lamsma (violin)

Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Mark Simpson is a multi-talented BBC New Generation Artist - both a spectacular clarinettist and a composer creating unique soundworlds. The BBC Symphony Orchestra opened the 2012 Last Night of the Proms with his work, Sparks, and tonight they give the London Premiere of his richly imagined tone-poem A mirror-fragment. The young Dutch star Simone Lamsma is then the soloist in Beethoven's great Violin Concerto. Sir Michael Tippett found inspiration for the Promethean energy and structural force of his Second Symphony in Beethoven's music: the vigorously assertive opening Allegro, and balletic curlicues of the scherzo-like Presto owe much to his hero's example, while the mosaic-like orchestration of the slow movement hint at the shimmering orchestral tapestries Tippett was to explore later in his career. Martyn Brabbins conducts this latest instalment in the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Tippett retrospective.

Martyn Brabbins conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Tippett's Symphony No 2.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world

Live from The Barbican Centre, London.

Presented by Petroc Trelawny

Vaughan Williams: Five Tudor Portraits

Lawrence Power (viola)

Rosie Aldridge (mezzo-soprano)

Neal Davies (baritone)

BBC Symphony Chorus

John Wilson (conductor)

John Wilson returns to the BBC Symphony Orchestra to conduct an all-English programme. Lawrence Power has proved a persuasive champion of York Bowen's gloriously romantic Viola Concerto, written for Lionel Tertis in 1908, and this provides the emotional core for a concert lit with ribald humour. Walton's ingenious 'comedy overture' Scapino, an exhilarating orchestral showpiece, finds a spirited echo in Vaughan Williams's earthy Five Tudor Portraits. Setting texts by Henry VIII's one-time tutor John Skelton, Vaughan Williams conjures up fives vivid character sketches, from the drunken Elinor Rumming to the charming Pretty Bess, a scherzo for the tattered Jolly Rutterkin, and Jane Scroop's heartfelt Requiem to her pet sparrow.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus perform Vaughan Williams's Five Tudor Portraits.

Presenting exciting live musical events from all over the world