Proms 2026 Salonen Conducts 20th-Century Classics

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the combined orchestras of London’s Royal Academy of Music and New York’s Juilliard School in three 20th-century orchestral masterworks. Award-winning Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang is the soloist in Berg’s heartbreaking elegy of a Violin Concerto, with its embedded Bach chorale, dedicated ‘to the memory of an angel’. Completed in the dying days of the Second World War, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements offers a ‘cinematographic impression of the war’ – jagged and convulsively rhythmic. Moving ‘from austerity to the affirmation of life’, Bartók’s 1943 Concerto for Orchestra responds more optimistically to war, defiant in its folk-inspired melodies and collective virtuosity.

Vilde Frang © Marco Borggreve