BBC Proms 2023 - Prom 52 - The Boston Symphony Orchestra play Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony

Live at the BBC Proms: Andris Nelsons conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra in music by Julia Adolphe, Richard Strauss and Prokofiev.

01. Julia Adolphe - Makeshift Castle (European premiere)
01a. Introduction to Adolphe’s Makeshift Castle
02. Strauss - Death and Transfiguration
02a. Introduction to Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration
02b. BBC Proms 2023 - Prom 52 - Interval
Tom Service is joined by Russian-born British musicologist and Cambridge University Professor Marina Frolova-Walker to talk about Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony.
03. Prokofiev - Symphony No. 5 in B flat major

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons (conductor)

The mighty Boston Symphony Orchestra returns to the Proms under Music Director Andris Nelsons for the first of two concerts – human resilience the theme. ‘I conceived of it as glorifying the grandeur of the human spirit,’ Prokofiev wrote of his Fifth Symphony, premiered in January 1945 at the start of the USSR’s successful final offensive against Nazi Germany. The defiant optimism of the finale is mirrored in Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Death and Transfiguration, in which a dying man gains a musical glimpse of eternity. Jointly commissioned by the BSO and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, of which Nelsons is also Music Director, Julia Adolphe’s Makeshift Castle offers a contemporary meditation on fragility and endurance.


Presented by Tom Service, live from the Royal Albert Hall.

Broadcast: 25 August 2023