The Proms returns with a programme of 20th- and 21st-century works. Composer-conductor George Benjamin directs new-music specialists, the London Sinfonietta – celebrating its 50th anniversary this year – in a concert that continues our series marking 100 years since the end of the First World War.
Alongside a quartet of war-themed premieres (co-commissioned with 14–18 NOW), the programme features Stravinsky’s homage to Debussy, the elegant Symphonies of Wind Instruments; Messiaen’s monumental tribute to the dead of both world wars, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, and Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, whose haunting solo trumpet famously raises ‘the perennial question of existence’.
Essential Info
Ives The Unanswered Question (6mins)
Stravinsky Symphonies of Wind Instruments (9 mins)
Messiaen Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (35 mins)
plus world premieres of First World War-themed works by Luca Francesconi, Georg Friedrich Haas, Hannah Kendall and Isabel Mundry
Susan Bickley mezzo-soprano
London Sinfonietta
George Benjamin conductor
There will be one interval