BBC Proms
Prom 31: George Lewis & Beethoven
S75 • E16 Sep 2, 2021 3h
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov pair Beethoven’s dramatic concert aria ‘Ah! perfido’ with the Second Symphony – a work whose vitality and ‘smiling’ mood belie the private struggles and despair of a composer wrestling with hearing loss – with a new commission from celebrated American composer George Lewis. This world premiere blends a conventional orchestra with spatialised electronics, exploiting the unique space of the Royal Albert Hall to create, in Lewis’s words, ‘a medium for meditation on what processes of decolonisation might sound like’.