The Vienna Philharmonic plays Bruckner

Live at the BBC Proms: The Vienna Philharmonic perform music from Berg's opera Lulu and Bruckner's Ninth Symphony with conductor Franz Welser-Möst.

Presented by Martin Handley, live from the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Alban Berg: Lulu Suite (Rondo; Variations; Adagio)

c. 8.05pm
Interval: The writer and musicologist Katy Hamilton talks to Martin Handley about why so many composers have struggled to write their ninth symphonies.

c. 8:30pm
Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 in D minor

Vienna Philharmonic
Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

One of the world’s great orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic concludes this year’s triptych of ninth symphonies with the grandest of them all. Dedicated to God, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 is the extraordinary product of a career’s experience and a decade’s labour – an unfinished swansong that confronts darkness even as it grasps towards heaven in music the composer himself thought ‘the most beautiful I have ever written’. The concert opens with Berg’s Lulu Suite, a distillation of the composer’s tragic opera into a heady and sometimes violent outpouring for orchestra.