Prom 68 (part 1): Cleveland Orchestra

Live from the Royal Albert Hall, London

Presented by Ian Skelly

The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst live at the BBC Proms with music by Brahms and the UK premiere of a work by Jörg Widmann featuring flautist Joshua Smith .

Brahms: Academic Festival Overture
Jörg Widmann: Flûte en suite (UK premiere)

8.15pm
Interval

8.35pm
Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68

Joshua Smith (flute)
Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst (conductor)

The Cleveland Orchestra is one of America's great ensembles. After an absence of almost a decade it returns to the Proms under Music Director Franz Welser-Möst for the first of two concerts.
If Brahms's stormy and intricately structured First Symphony sees the composer at his most serious and structurally ambitious, his Academic Festival Overture is a rare example of his levity - an elegantly constructed musical thank-you-letter to Breslau University, taking its themes from boisterous student songs.
At the centre of the programme is a concerto commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra for its principal flautist Joshua Smith. Rejecting anything too grandiose, young German composer Jörg Widmann has opted for a suite of dance movements - playful, referential and imaginatively disorienting.