Prom 60Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

Part of the BBC Proms.Rachmaninov’s 150th-anniversary celebrations continue with the composer’s final Symphony, a work tinged with yearning. ‘Only one place is closed to me,’ Rachmaninov wrote after his exile in the USA, ‘and that is my own country, Russia.’ Following in the virtuoso tradition of Rachmaninov is Thomas Ades’s Piano Concerto, performed here by Kirill Gerstein, who gave the 2019 premiere. The work’s sardonic brilliance finds an echo in the suite from Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (‘The Threepenny Opera’), with its famous ‘Ballad of Mack the Knife’. Coming after last week’s visitors from Boston (where the Ades concerto was premiered), tonight we welcome the esteemed Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin – 100 this year – making its Proms debut under Chief Conductor since 2017, Vladimir Jurowski.