STOCKHAUSEN DAY

STOCKHAUSEN Gruppen
STOCKHAUSEN Klang, 13th hour – Cosmic Pulses (for electronics) (UK premiere)
STOCKHAUSEN Klang, 5th hour – Harmonien for solo trumpet (BBC commission: world premiere)
STOCKHAUSEN Kontakte
STOCKHAUSEN Gruppen (repeat performance)

David Robertson conductor
Pascal Rophe conductor
Ludovic Morlot conductor
Marco Blaauw trumpet
Nicolas Hodges piano
Colin Currie percussion

One of the most influential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, Karlheinz Stockhausen would have turned 80 this year. Aside from the performance of Punkte ('Points') by the Gurzenich Orchestra under Markus Stenz on the actual day that would have been the composer’s 80th birthday (Prom 48), this Stockhausen Day offers a fuller immersion into the work of this uniquely uncompromising creative force. This early-evening Prom contrasts a pair of Stockhausen's early works – Gruppen ('Groups'), which passes ideas between three spatially separated ensembles, and Kontakte, referring to 'contacts' between instrumental and electronic sounds – with two recent works – both of them excerpts from Klang, the large-scale sequence on which Stockhausen was working at the time of his death last December.

MESSIAEN L'Ascension
STRAVINSKY Violin Concerto
GEORGE BENJAMIN Ringed by the Flat Horizon
RAVEL Pavane pour une infante défunte
RAVEL Bolero

George Benjamin conductor
Carolin Widmann violin

A former pupil of Messiaen, Benjamin opens with L’Ascension, a sequence of meditations on religious themes. Carolin Widmann makes her Proms debut in Stravinsky’s coolly neo-Classical concerto. Benjamin’s own Ringed by the Flat Horizon, premiered while its composer was still a student at Cambridge, is dedicated to Messiaen and vividly depicts a storm brewing over a desolate New Mexico desert. The concert ends, as it began, in France, with one of Ravel’s most limpid scores and one of his most popular.

SIBELIUS Night Ride and Sunrise
MICHAEL BERKELEY Slow Dawn (world premiere of new version)
STUART MACRAE Gaudete (BBC commission: world premiere)
ELGAR Enigma Variations

Edward Gardner conductor
Susanna Andersson soprano

The young Music Director of English National Opera, Edward Gardner, gives the premieres of two British works: Stuart MacRae's nature-inspired Gaudete and Michael Berkeley's revisiting of his Slow Dawn, which he describes as depicting 'the gradual appearance of the sun (in the form of the tuba) as it climbs into the sky. Shafts of light and playful reflections accompany the increasing warmth of day.' The sun theme first arises in Sibelius’s evocative Night Ride and Sunrise, a typically brooding tone-poem. Elgar’s affectionate sketches of his 'friends pictured within' have caught the imaginations of thousands over the past 100 years.

JANACEK Sinfonietta
JANACEK Capriccio
l JANACEK Glagolitic Mass (original version, reconstr. Paul Wingfield)

Pierre Boulez conductor
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet piano
Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet soprano
Anna Stephany mezzo-soprano
Simon O'Neill tenor
Peter Fried bass
Simon Preston organ
BBC Symphony Chorus
London Symphony Chorus

The music of Leos Janacek is a relatively recent departure for Pierre Boulez, who conducted From the House of the Dead at the Aix-en-Provence Festival last year to great acclaim. Here he takes on two of the Czech composer's greatest non-theatrical works, as well as the rarely encountered Concertino for piano and orchestra. The Sinfonietta, with its extraordinary brassy sonorities, shares the first half with the Concertino. The Glagolitic Mass - featuring Simon Preston, who later returns for his Bach Day recital (Prom 50) - is visceral in its orchestration, and is here restored to Janacek more fiery and dramatic original version.

DVORAK Slavonic Dances, Op.46
JANACEK Osud (concert performance, sung in Czech)

Jiri Belohlavekconductor
Stefan Margita Zivny
Amanda Roocroft Mila
Rosalind Plowright Mila's Mother
Ales Briscein Dr Suda Hrazda
Ailish Tynan Ms Stuhla
Martina Bauerova Ms Pacovska/Fanea/Souckova
George Longworth Doubek (as a child)
BBC Singers

Jiri Belohlavek conducts music from his homeland: Dvorak's infectiously vital Slavonic Dances - which brought him to the attention of Brahms - and Janacek's rarely heard Osud ('Fate'). This swift-moving opera about the writing of an opera - with a luridly melodramatic plot involving unmarried motherhood, suicide, murder and madness - was not performed for three decades after its composer's death but contains some of Janacek's most inspired music. Stefan Margita stars in the semi-autobiographical role of the composer Zivny, with Amanda Roocroft as both the object of his obsessive love and the subject of his long-gestated masterpiece.

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Job - A Masque for Dancing
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Serenade to Music
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Symphony No.9

Sarah Tynan, Elizabeth Atherton, Sophie Bevan, Rachel Nicholls sopranos
Allison Cook, Louise Poole, Julia Riley, Catherine Hopper mezzo-sopranos
Ed Lyon, Joshua Ellicott, Peter Wedd, Nicholas Sharratt tenors
Mark Stone, Darren Jeffery, George von Bergen,Tim Mirfin basses
Sir Andrew Davis conductor

A high point of our tribute to Vaughan Williams, who died 50 years ago today. Sir Andrew Davis, Conductor Laureate of the BBC SO, returns for a programme that opens with the much-loved Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Its rich, string-dominated textures are followed by the ballet, Job, first staged by Ninette de Valois. The Serenade to Music, to words by Shakespeare, was written for 16 leading British singers of the day and premiered by Henry Wood at his Jubiliee Concert 70 years ago. And, to close,VW’s last symphony, originally conceived as a programmatic work based on Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.