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Highlights from the BBC Proms, the UK's greatest classical music festival

Highlights from the BBC Proms, the UK's greatest classical music festival.

Memorable performances from the Proms season of classical concerts, recorded in the unique atmosphere of the Royal Albert Hall in London.

BBC Proms on the World Service: Dido's Lament and the Fourth Symphony by Brahms

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BBC National Orchestra of Wales with Ryan Bancroft in the Royal Albert Hall, 02 August 2021

07/08/2021 GMT

Dido's Lament and the Fourth Symphony by Brahms

BBC World Service - BBC Proms on the World Service, Dido's Lament and the Fourth Symphony by Brahms

Highlights from the 2021 season of BBC Proms, the UK's greatest classical music festival

Highlights from the 2021 season of BBC Proms, the UK's greatest classical music festival.

Broadcast programme:
Purcell, arr. Stokowski - Dido’s Lament
Brahms - Symphony No. 4 in E minor

BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Ryan Bancroft (conductor)

The BBC Proms are back in the Royal Albert Hall in London with a six-week season of concerts featuring leading British orchestras as well as international soloists and conductors. The weekly World Service broadcasts from the festival begin with perhaps the best known of Henry Purcell's arias, Dido's Lament from his opera Dido and Aeneas. We’ll hear it in an arrangement for strings only by the 20th-century conductor Leopold Stokowski. 

Johannes Brahms wrote his Fourth Symphony two centuries after Purcell but there is a link between the Lament and the Symphony's last movement: they are both built on a single bass line. In fact, Brahms was very keen to use and adapt compositional techniques from the past in his own music and the melody that serves as the main theme of the Symphony's fourth movement is actually a modified bass line from JS Bach's Cantata BWV 150. Brahms was on an editorial committee that was preparing the first modern publication of Bach's cantatas and this may be where his inspiration came from.

Presenter Andrew McGregor is joined by the Australian conductor Natalie Murray-Beale.

[Photo: BBC National Orchestra of Wales with Ryan Bancroft in the Royal Albert Hall. Credit: Chris Christodoulou/BBC]

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