Proms 2024 Prom 9: Mahler, Brahms and Schoenberg

Both Gustav Mahler and Friedrich Rückert lost children. When Mahler came to set Rückert’s grief-stricken poems on the subject as his five Kindertotenlieder, he did so with music that appears emotionally stunned and radiantly consolatory. Leading international mezzo-soprano Alice Coote lends her glowing voice to these devastating songs, after Ryan Wigglesworth conducts his BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in a symphony by Brahms that is both menacing and mellifluous. At the heart of the programme is Schoenberg’s sumptuous tone-poem Verklärte Nacht (‘Transfigured Night’), filled with crepuscular angst and decadent late-Romantic harmony.

Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3

Image: Alice Coote © Jiyang Chen