Today’s concert at the BBC Proms features a delicious mix of Ravel, Mozart, Mussorgsky and the unjustly neglected French female composer Augusta Holmès.
Our website www.classical-music.com is your one-stop shop for all BBC Proms content. We’ve got guides to each day’s Prom, including repertoire, performers and more. Meanwhile, head to our 2024 BBC Proms guide for an overview of all the Proms this year. These include the 73 Proms taking place at the Royal Albert Hall in London, plus other Proms concerts around the UK – chamber music in Aberdeen, Newport and Belfast, and weekend festivals in Bristol, Nottingham and Gateshead.
What’s on at the BBC Proms today?
It’s Prom 43 at the 2024 BBC Proms today. And we begin with the suite from Maurice Ravel‘s Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose). Ravel composed this work in 1910, as a piano duet for Mimi and Jean Godebski, aged six and seven. Its five movements evoke scenes from fairytales including Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb and Beauty and the Beast.
Ravel then gave the piece a full orchestration the following year, in 1911. He also expanded it into a ballet, with 11 movements. However, it’s the five-movement orchestration you’ll hear tonight.
Next on tonight’s programme is Mozart‘s final Piano Concerto, Number 27 in B flat major. First performed early in 1791, the year of its composer’s death, No. 27 has an eloquent simplicity about it in places. It’s certainly a rather more direct and limpid concerto than, say, its flashier predecessor, No. 26 ‘Coronation’.
Following that is a work you might not know. It’s by the female French composer Augusta Holmès (1847-1903). Holmès’s story is somewhat similar to that of other 19th-century female composers such as Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann, in that the prevailing climate – in which women were discouraged from a career in music – obliged her to publish some early works under a male pseudonym – Hermann Zenta, in this case.
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Tonight you will hear ‘La nuit et l’amour’, an orchestral interlude from Holmès’s choral work Ludus pro patria.
This evening’s major work is Mussorgsky‘s Pictures at an Exhibition. Originally composed as a piano suite, this magnificent work has been given several orchestral transcriptions. The most commonly heard orchestration is by Ravel. Tonight, however, you will hear the orchestration made in 1915 (five years before Ravel’s effort) by the Proms founder Sir Henry Wood.
What is Pictures at an Exhibition about?
Pictures at an Exhibition is something quite unique in the classical music repertoire. It’s a depiction, in music, of a tour of a painting exhibition. The exhibition was by the Russian artist (and friend of Mussorgsky’s) Viktor Hartmann, and was staged at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, not long after Hartmann’s sudden death.
Each movement of Pictures is based on a painting from the exhibition. So what we have are ten musical ‘pictures’, evoked by Hartmann’s actual pictures, interspersed with briefer ‘promenade’ sections as we make our way one painting to the next.
We hear evocations of a catacomb of skulls; of an Italian medieval castle with a troubadour standing before it; of Baba Yaga, the fascinating and slightly eerie figure that dominates much Slavic folklore; of children playing in the Tuileries gardens in Paris; and much more. It’s a hugely arresting and atmospheric listening experience.
Who is performing at the BBC Proms today?
Tonight’s performers are the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and their chief conductor Kazuki Yamada. They are joined, for the Mozart piano concerto, by the British pianist Paul Lewis.
What time is tonight’s Prom?
Prom 43 gets underway at 7.30pm. Tickets are priced between £11 and £54.