Here's your brief guide to the BBC Proms concert taking place at the Royal Albert Hall on Thursday, 25 July 2024. Need more Proms? Head to our full BBC Proms 2024 listings to find every concert and every performer.
What's on at the Proms today?
Today's Prom, Prom 9, features the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth in performances of Johannes Brahms's emotive Symphony No. 3 in F major and Arnold Schoenberg's passionate Expressionist masterpiece Verklärte Nacht.
Conductor and orchestra are also joined by mezzo-soprano Alice Coote for Gustav Mahler's 1904 song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). This emotional song cycle features musical settings of five poems by the German poet Friedrich Rückert, who also provided the texts for another Mahler song cycle, the Rückert Lieder.
What are Mahler's Kindertotenlieder?
Rückert himself composed some 428 Kindertodtenlieder, in a huge outpouring of grief after the illness and death, from scarlet fever, of two of his children. Mahler selected five of them, and between 1901 and 1904 scored them for a vocal soloist (usually a baritone or mezzo-soprano), accompanied by a chamber orchestra featuring flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, percussion, harp, strings and more.
Mahler was very specific that the songs should be performed in the order he prescribed: they were, he said, 'intended as one inseparate unit, and in performing them their continuity should not be interfered with'. Like Rückert's poems, the songs convey a mix of emotions including anguished pain, a desperate hope for the children to return, and resignation. Indeed, the final song 'In diesem wetter' ('In this weather') closes on a major key and an atmosphere of calm transcendence.
Who is Alice Coote?
The British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote has found fame with her opera performances, in which she has played both male and female roles. She is at home in a wide range of repertoire, from early and Baroque music to contemporary pieces.
Alice Coote was made in an OBE for services to music in Queen Elizabeth's 2018 Birthday honours list.
The composer Judith Weir has written a song cycle, The Voice of Desire, for Alice Coote.
What is a mezzo-soprano?
From the Italian word for 'half', the mezzo-soprano range lies between the soprano and contralto ranges. Alongside Alice Coote, other famous mezzo-sopranos past and present include the great German singer Christa Ludwig, Scottish mezzo Karen Cargill, and American singer and former BBC Music Magazine Personality of the Year Jamie Barton, who also performs at the 2024 BBC Proms (Mahler's Rückert Lieder, as it happens).
