Grieg's Piano Concerto

Live at the BBC Proms: the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sakari Oramo in Grieg's Piano Concerto with soloist Lukas Sternath. Plus Ruth Gipps and Bliss's cantata The Beatitudes.

Presented by Petroc Trelawny at the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Ruth Gipps: Death on the Pale Horse
Edvard Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor

c. 8.10pm
Interval: The cellist, conductor and broadcaster Julian Lloyd Webber joins Petroc Trelawny to discuss Bliss's powerful, reflective and consoling ode.

c.8.30pm
Arthur Bliss: The Beatitudes

Elizabeth Watts (soprano)
Laurence Kilsby (tenor)
Lukas Sternath (piano)
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo (conductor)

Prize-winning young Viennese pianist Lukas Sternath makes his Proms debut in Grieg’s beloved Piano Concerto, with its heart-on-sleeve melodies and intimate lyricism. The piece is framed by two musical products of war: a haunting elegy by Vaughan Williams’s pupil Ruth Gipps, inspired by a William Blake illustration of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and anniversary-composer Arthur Bliss’s The Beatitudes, a cantata intended for the reopening in 1962 of Coventry Cathedral – part Passion, part howl of human loss, part musical prayer for a ‘troubled world’.