BBC Proms 2020

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BBC Proms

Music: Classical

2024

The world's greatest classical music festival - stunning performances and collaborations.

The world's greatest classical music festival. Stunning performances, unique collaborations and the sheer joy of live music. Relive 2023's highlights before the new season begins.

BBC Proms: Proms 2020: Beethoven from Memory

Beethoven from Memory

Proms 2020

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

The Aurora Orchestra perform Beethoven's Seventh Symphony from memory.

Radio 3’s Tom Service and Nicholas Collon introduce Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, performed from memory, plus Richard Ayres’s No 52, which explores the effects of hearing loss.

Another chance to hear the Aurora Orchestra perform Beethoven's Seventh Symphony from memory and Richard Ayres's No 52 at the 2020 BBC Proms.

Presented by Tom Service with Nicholas Collon.

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

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 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: Proms 2020

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.

Another chance to hear broadcasts of selected concerts from the 2020 BBC Proms season.

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