| Set List | 'Festive Overture 7', Shostakovich
'Symphony No. 5 68', Mahler |
| Performance Notes | In 2021, the BBC Proms returns to the Royal Albert Hall for a summer of live music, as it has done every year since 1941. With 46 concerts over 44 days, featuring 30 orchestras and ensembles and more than 2,000 musicians, this ambitious season promises a celebration of live music on a scale not seen since before the pandemic. From the power of a symphony orchestra to the sheer joy of a single performer on the Halls magnificent organ, this summer we look forward to coming together through music. Every Prom will be live on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds.
The third of four Mystery Proms whose details will be revealed nearer the time.
After a year in which venues fell quiet and orchestras downsized, tonights Prom is a celebration of all an orchestra can do. A specially assembled Proms Festival Orchestra made up of leading freelance musicians and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth performs two colourful showpieces of the repertoire. Shostakovichs Festive Overture bubbles over with a fresh exuberance that reflects the fact that its composer wrote it in two days flat.
Mahlers Fifth Symphony spans an expressive chasm from the Funeral March of the first movement to a precariously unhinged Scherzo via the works lingering, lyrical soul: the heart-rendingly beautiful Adagietto, written as a musical love letter to his wife Alma.
The season was shortened to six, rather than eight, weeks because of the financial risk to the BBC not knowing audience sizes due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. |
| Related Archival Material | Prospectus (RAHE/1/2021/5),
Programme (RAHE/1/2021/) |