BBC Proms 2020

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BBC Proms: 2020 Live: Beethoven from Memory

Beethoven from Memory

2020 Live

BBC Radio 3 - BBC Proms, 2020 Live, Beethoven from Memory

Aurora Orchestra perform Beethoven's Seventh Symphony from memory

Radio 3’s Tom Service and Nicholas Collon introduce Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and Richard Ayres’s new work that explores the effects of hearing loss.

Live at the BBC Proms from the Royal Albert Hall, London
Presented by Tom Service

Richard Ayres No. 52 (Three pieces about Ludwig van Beethoven: dreaming, hearing loss and saying goodbye) 
BBC co-commission: world premiere


Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 7 in A major


Tom Service presenter
Aurora Orchestra
Nicholas Collon conductor


Beethoven’s hearing loss plunged the composer into isolation and despair, so it’s hard to believe him capable of producing a symphony such as his Seventh, which pulses with restless energy – and which the Aurora Orchestra plays from memory. It’s a work with a special place in Proms history, too: it was the last piece Proms founder-conductor Henry Wood directed before his death in 1944.

Richard Ayres opens the concert with a deeply personal new work inspired both by Beethoven’s journey into deafness and his own experience of hearing loss, a vivid soundscape in which clarity gradually gives way to confusion.

Radio 3’s Tom Service and Aurora Orchestra Principal Conductor Nicholas Collon guide us through the programme with their customary lively and expert introductions.

BBC Proms: 2020 Live

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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BBC Proms

2020 Live

Beethoven from Memory

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