大象传媒

Broadcast programme:
Purcell, arr. Stokowski - Dido鈥檚 Lament
Brahms - Symphony No. 4 in E minor

大象传媒 National Orchestra of Wales
Ryan Bancroft (conductor)

The 大象传媒 Proms are back in the Royal Albert Hall in London with a six-week season of concerts featuring leading British orchestras as well as international soloists and conductors. The weekly World Service broadcasts from the festival begin with perhaps the best known of Henry Purcell's arias, Dido's Lament from his opera Dido and Aeneas. We鈥檒l hear it in an arrangement for strings only by the 20th-century conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Johannes Brahms wrote his Fourth Symphony two centuries after Purcell but there is a link between the Lament and the Symphony's last movement: they are both built on a single bass line. In fact, Brahms was very keen to use and adapt compositional techniques from the past in his own music and the melody that serves as the main theme of the Symphony's fourth movement is actually a modified bass line from JS Bach's Cantata BWV 150. Brahms was on an editorial committee that was preparing the first modern publication of Bach's cantatas and this may be where his inspiration came from.

Presenter Andrew McGregor is joined by the Australian conductor Natalie Murray-Beale.

[Photo: 大象传媒 National Orchestra of Wales with Ryan Bancroft in the Royal Albert Hall. Credit: Chris Christodoulou/大象传媒]