Prom 24: A Hero's Life

Live at BBC Proms: BBC NOW and conductor Otto Tausk with the cellist Daniel Müller‐Schott in Dvořák's Cello Concerto. Plus performances of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben and the Prelude to Act 2 of Dame Ethel Smyth's opera The Wreckers.

Live from the Royal Albert Hall, London
Presented by Ian Skelly

Smyth: The Wreckers - On the Cliffs of Cornwall (Prelude to Act 2)
Dvořák: Cello Concerto in B minor

c. 8pm Interval: commemorating 50 years since the Russian maestro Mstilav Rostropovich famously performed Dvorak's Cello Concerto at the Proms as Soviet tanks entered Prague, Sir John Tusa and Marina Frolova-Walker discuss with Petroc Trelawny the cultural repercussions started by the upheaval across the Iron Curtain. Recorded earlier at the Imperial College Union.

c. 8.25pm
Strauss: Ein Heldenleben

Daniel Müller‐Schott (cello)
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Otto Tausk (conductor)

Triumphant horns and a flirtatious, vivacious solo violin set the tone for Strauss's vivid autobiographical tone-poem Ein Heldenleben - 'A Hero's Life', outwardly inspired by 'an ideal of great and manly heroism'. The orchestra is also at the forefront in Dvořák's Cello Concerto, sounding as an equal partner to the soloist - German cellist Daniel Müller-Schott, who returns to the Proms under tonight's debut conductor Otto Tausk - in an intensely personal work that marries a pervasive sense of longing with real passion. And in the centenary year of British women gaining the right to vote, Ethel Smyth's evocative Act 2 Prelude from The Wreckers celebrates a key British composer who, as a suffragette, spent two months in Holloway Prison.