About This Show
Part of the BBC Proms.
This season the Proms looks beyond the piano and violin to concertos that explore more unusual instruments, including the tuba, trombone and theremin. Award-winning violist Lawrence Power launches the strand with a new concerto by Canadian composer Cassandra Miller. It is the latest in a long series of major works Power has commissioned for an instrument whose range and reputation he continues to expand. The concert opens with Webern’s airy, pellucid arrangement of Bach’s ‘richest piece of fugal writing’ – the six-part Ricercar from his Musical Offering – and closes with the symphony Bruckner himself considered his ‘sassiest’. Baffling the composer’s contemporaries with its relative brevity and sudden shifts of musical direction, it has been praised for its ‘exceptionally beautiful’ themes and the subtlety of its instrumentation.
