| Main Performers | Benjamin Grosvenor - piano,
Anna Lapwood - organ |
| Set List | 'Subito Con Forza', U Chin,
'Piano Concerto No.4 in G Major (cadenzas: Saint-Saens)', Beethoven,
'Symphony No.3 in C Minor 'Organ'', Saint-Saens |
| 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 52 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.
What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again. So wrote Camille Saint-Saens of his last and greatest symphony, a work full of melody, invention and sonic drama (not to mention a piano-duet effect he liked so much he recycled it in The Carnival of the Animals).
Just as the mighty Organ Symphony rewrote the 19th-century musical rules, so Beethovens Piano Concerto No. 4 scandalised audiences some 80 years earlier, with its revolutionary opening and tender, slow-movement battle between soloist and orchestra, famously compared to Orpheus taming the Furies.
Beethoven is also the inspiration for Unsuk Chins volatile Subito con forza, given its UK premiere here by Sir Mark Elder and the Halle.
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/),
Digital Photographs |