Prom 69 – Smetana, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky

Part of the BBC Proms.

The dancing rhythms and swirling colours of Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride launch a concert of big musical gestures and even bigger emotions. First love blazes hot in the Letter Scene from Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, as Tatyana (sung here by soprano Elena Stikhina) pours out her heart in music as romantic as anything the composer ever wrote. War, not love, drives the pulsing heartbeat of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony – the most personal and direct of the composer’s many attempts ‘to express the terrible tragedy of war’.