THE PROMS LISTENING SERVICE Radio 3’s Tom Service proposes onward sonic explorations inspired by the music of tonight’s Prom

SIBELIUS musical universe out there – you have to in every bar, including its final bassoon Symphony No. 7 experience Thomas Adès’s , composed explosion. Gustav Mahler’s sense of the for Rattle and the Berlin Phil in 2007, and sardonic runs throughout his symphonies; Sibelius’s Seventh leaves you with ‘the longest its vision of spaceship earth being cradled most biting of all, for me, is the Rondo- scream in C major in Western music’. Not through the cosmos. Burlesque from the Ninth Symphony, a my words but the darkly dazzling summation darkly hilarious and fugal two fingers to of the piece from Sir . Whether RACHMANINOV critics who said he couldn’t write or not you agree about the despair that counterpoint. And, even earlier, what is Rattle hears in that final agonised (for him!) Piano Concerto No. 2 Beethoven’s whole Eighth Symphony if not striving towards a C major resolution at the The bells, the bells … Rachmaninov’s music a series of parodies turned into one of the end of Sibelius’s last and most adventurous is full of them, and you hear them tolling right most profoundly radical orchestral pieces symphonic journey, you’ll agree with him, at the start of his Second Piano Concerto. ever composed? I hope, on the intensity of this music, Russian bells, he said, were part of the especially its final moments. The cosmic soundscape of his life – and of that of all play of time, speed and musical fundamentals Russians in the late 19th and early 20th in the Seventh Symphony opens up some centuries. They marked births and deaths, galactic musical terrain that it took later they sounded their calls to worship, and they generations of composers to explore fully. made their way into the music of all of Here are the cosmic pathways to follow Russia’s finest composers: listen to them in with your ears and imagination! Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, in Stravinsky’s For sheer musical elementality, extending Les noces and in Rachmaninov’s choral Sibelius’s sense that music is no longer a symphony called – what else? – The Bells. metaphor for experience but a force of SHOSTAKOVICH nature in its own right, my go-to composer is the Greek creative polymath . Symphony No. 10 Any of his orchestral pieces will give you the I remember that the band U2, on their thrill of music as tempest, as solar wind, as Zooropa stadium tour in the mid-1990s, natural phenomenon, but one of my used the grotesquely malevolent second- favourites is his electrifying Jonchaies. movement scherzo from Shostakovich’s Finnish composers have taken Sibelius’s 10th Symphony as their warm-up act. It was legacy into new dimensions: for a 21st- a brilliant use of the piece – at Celtic Park in century symphonic space-scape, Kaija Glasgow, no less! – making its violence and Saairaho’s Orion is one of the most satire shock the crowds before the band scintillating trips you can go on from the stormed the stage with their own send-up of Join Tom Service on his musical odyssey in The Listening safety of your armchair. No need for Richard media manipulation in Zooropa’s songs. Service on BBC Radio 3, Sundays at 5.00pm, from Branson, Elon Musk or the International But symphonic satire isn’t something that 3 September. Go to The Listening Service on the Radio 3 Space Station, just listen to Saariaho! Shostakovich invented. Nobody knows what website to hear clips, watch animations, download previous episodes and listen to Listening Service playlist. And for another piece that warps musical Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s Sixth time – and which creates a single-movement Symphony is really about but, whatever else Visit the Proms website 20-minute structure that suggests, like this symphonic enigma is doing, it’s sending for articles and more from Sibelius’s symphony, that there’s a vaster up pretty well the whole of musical culture the Proms Listening Service.

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