Synopsis
Marin Alsop, a protégée of Leonard Bernstein, returns to the Proms with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for a politically charged climax to our bank-holiday Bernstein weekend. The concert culminates in Shostakovich’s ambiguous Fifth Symphony, whose triumphant finale can be heard either as political protest or capitulation to Stalin’s Soviet regime. Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet joins the orchestra for Bernstein’s ‘The Age of Anxiety’ – a musical quest for faith in a broken, post-war world – and the evening opens with the boisterous Slava!, a ‘political overture’ dedicated to cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.