Proms 2026 John Wilson Conducts Respighi’s ‘Roman Trilogy’

John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London – hailed by critics as ‘peerless’ and ‘simply as good as it gets’ – are back for the first of two concerts this season. Ottorino Respighi’s love affair with Rome is captured in a trilogy of orchestral tone-poems – heat-soaked, colour-saturated works that invite the listener into the mercurial life of the Eternal City: festivals and dances, misty mornings and scented summer evenings, fanfares and solitary silence. The concert opens with Verdi’s much-loved overture to The Force of Destiny and Walton’s rhapsodic Cello Concerto, its ardent, yearning spirit perhaps a portrait of the composer’s own marriage. Norwegian cellist Jonathan Aasgaard is the soloist.

Recorded for broadcast on BBC TV and BBC iPlayer

Jonathan Aasgaard © Mark McNulty