Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen makes her Proms debut in excerpts from Grieg’s Peer Gynt and Sibelius’s tone-poem Luonnotar. The sophisticated orchestral textures and sensuous melodies of the latter couldn’t be further from the rough-hewn folk music of the composer’s buoyant Karelia Suite.
Linked to his opera about historical events at the time of the Protestant Reformation, Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler was denounced by the Nazi regime as ‘degenerate’. Alban Gerhardt is the soloist for Schumann’s Cello Concerto, which rejects overt solo virtuosity in favour of a dialogue between cello and orchestra.
Image: Lise Davidsen © Charlotte Gundersen