Here's your daily 2024 BBC Proms preview from BBC Music Magazine. This morning we're looking at Prom 67 (Monday 9 September), featuring works from Vaughan Williams, Schoenberg and Shostakovich.
Keep coming back to www.classical-music.com during this last week of the Proms - it all culminates with the Last Night of the Proms on Saturday 14 September. Every day this Proms season we're previewing the daily Proms concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, including performers, repertoire and more. And, to see all of this year's Proms in one place (in London and at six other UK cities), just head over to our 2024 BBC Proms guide.
What's on at the BBC Proms today?
Today is Prom 67. And we begin with a much-loved British orchestral piece. The Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’ was arranged by Ralph Greaves from Vaughan Williams's treatment of folk tunes in his opera Sir John in Love, which draws on Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor.
- These 11 Shakespeare plays have inspired some of the greatest music ever written
- Which is your favourite Vaughan Williams work?
Did Henry VIII write Greensleeves?
A widely held myth goes that the melody for 'Greensleeves' was written by King Henry VIII. However, this cannot actually be true, as the tune is based on a particular form of musical composition that only arrived in England from Italy after Henry's death.
BBC Proms today: Schoenberg and Shostakovich
Next on the programme for Prom 67 is Arnold Schoenberg's only Violin Concerto. Composed from 1934 to 1936 (with Schoenberg now a resident in Los Angeles, having left Nazi Germany), the concerto is a fascinating work, both intellectually challenging and (perhaps rarer in Schoenberg) emotionally expressive.
It's written, like much of Schoenberg's music, in a twelve-tone style - see Serialism - that doesn't employ traditional tonality. It's technically demanding for the performer, and it's also an intellectually complex listen, making it one of the key works of 20th century Modernism.
After the interval, we get tonight's main piece: the Symphony No. 5 by Shostakovich. This towering masterpiece can take its place as one of the 20th century's greatest symphonies - along with Mahler's Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, Sibelius's Second and Fifth, Rachmaninov's Second, Prokofiev's Fifth, and Shostakovich's own Symphony No. 10.
'A brilliant balancing act of public compliance and private defiance'
The composition of the Fifth came at a pivotal moment in Shostakovich’s career. At the time, he found himself under intense political pressure from the Soviet regime. The state newspaper Pravda had condemned his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in a 1936 article called 'Muddle Instead of Music', and Shostakovich was accused of writing music that was too complex, formalist, and not sufficiently optimistic about the progress of Communism.
It was a crucial moment for Shostakovich. His next major work would have to tick the right boxes with the authorities. And the Symphony No. 5, which he subtitled 'A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism', did just that. In fact, as so often with Shostakovich, there's a surface conformity to the authority's demands for accessible, triumphant music; underneath, though, there's a much more ambivalent tone. In this way, Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony is a brilliant balancing act of public compliance and private defiance.
Who is performing at the BBC Proms today?
Today's Proms performers are the BBC Symphony Orchestra - one of 12 appearances they are making at this year's Proms - and the young Finnish conductor Tarmo Peltokoski. The soloist for the Schoenberg Violin Concerto is the acclaimed Moldovan-Austrian violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja.
What time is tonight's Prom?
Prom 67 gets underway at 7.30pm, and tickets are priced from £11 to £54.
