BBC Proms 2022 - Prom 8 - Russian Romance and Icelandic Elements (320kbps .mp3)

Live at the BBC Proms: BBC Symphony Orchestra & BBC Singers conducted by Dalia Stasevska. Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov with pianist Denis Kozhukhin, and a new work by Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Presented by Sarah Walker live from the Royal Albert Hall, London.

01. Jóhannsson, Jóhann - The Miners’ Hymns – They Being Dead Yet Speaketh
01a. Introduction to the Russian Romance prom
02. Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op.18
03. Tchaikovsky - Children's Album Op.39 No.4 [encore]
03a. Interval commentary
The film Brief Encounter features in the top ten romantic films of yesteryear list compiled by the Reader’s Digest Magazine. That publication is celebrating its centenary this year. In the first of a series of Interval features looking back at cultural milestones in 1922 – the year the BBC was founded – Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough finds out about the history of the Reader’s Digest.
04. Guðnadóttir, Hildur - The Fact of the Matter (BBC commission: world premiere)
05. Tchaikovsky - Fantasy-Overture ‘Romeo and Juliet’
05a. Introduction to Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture
Denis Kozhukhin (piano)
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Dalia Stasevska (conductor)

A piano sounds quietly in the silence; an old song, long buried, heaves itself upwards to echo and resound anew. At first, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s atmospheric reworkings of Durham miners’ songs might not sound as if they have much to do with Rachmaninov’s popular Piano Concerto No.2. But in the hands of BBC Symphony Orchestra Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska and pianist Denis Kozhukhin, they become part of a deeper, darker picture: an unfolding soundscape that embraces both the soaring romantic tragedy of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and the elemental sonorities of Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir – the extraordinary, Academy Award-winning musical imagination behind Joker and Chernobyl.

Broadcast: 20 July 2022