Prom 35 – Yuja Want with The Oslo Philharmonic and Klaus Makela

Part of the BBC Proms.

From the battle between soloist and orchestra that opens Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 to the autobiographical strivings and yearnings of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (‘A Hero’s Life’), Romantic urgency courses through this Prom from the Oslo Philharmonic and Chief Conductor Klaus Mäkelä. Piano sensation Yuja Wang is the soloist in Liszt’s mould-breaking concerto – pianistic brilliance meeting formal innovation with explosive results – while the orchestra takes centre stage in two great tone-poems, setting the cool, mythic forests of Sibelius’s Tapiola, with their ‘magic secrets’ and ‘wood sprites’, against the human heat of life and love in Ein Heldenleben.