BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Prague Spring Festival

Penny Gore continues her week featuring recent tour concerts by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Today their outgoing Chief Conductor, the Czech Jiri Belohlavek, takes his orchestra home with him - to perform English, Czech and French music at the 2012 Prague Spring Festival in May. The dancing rhythms and rapt serenity of Michael Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra is juxtaposed with the remarkable forty-minute span of The Ripening by Dvorak's son-in-law Josef Suk, and Bohuslav Martinu's Fourth Symphony. Plus Ravel - Argentinian mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink joins the BBC SO in Prague for his smoochy ShÃ(c)hÃ(c)razade, and 60th birthday boy Oliver Knussen conducts the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales back home in London.

Tippett: Concerto for Double String Orchestra
BBC Symphony Orchestra,
Jiri Belohlavek (conductor).

c. 2.20pm
Ravel: ShÃ(c)hÃ(c)razade
Bernarda Fink (mezzo),
BBC Symphony Orchestra,
Jiri Belohlavek (conductor).

c. 2.40pm
Suk: The Ripening, Op. 34
KÃ1/4hn Female Chorus,
BBC Symphony Orchestra,
Jiri Belohlavek (conductor).

c. 3.20pm
Ravel: Valses Nobles et Sentimentales
BBC Symphony Orchestra,
Oliver Knussen (conductor).

c. 3.45pm
Martinu: Symphony no. 4
BBC Symphony Orchestra,
Jiri Belohlavek (conductor).