Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Vilde Frang in Berg’s Violin Concerto — plus Stravinsky and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, with the Juilliard and RAM orchestras.

Programme

Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements
Berg Violin Concerto
Bartók Concerto for Orchestra

Vilde Frang (violin)
Juilliard Orchestra · Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Esa-Pekka Salonen

Monday 10 August 2026 · 7pm–c9.15pm
Royal Albert Hall

Listen on BBC Radio 3 / BBC Sounds

Preview

This Prom is perhaps the most satisfying combination of works — off the beaten track without leaving you feeling entirely isolated and alone. Anyone with an aversion to performative acts and sentimentality, or those like-minded souls who recognise that real life is utterly unbearable, will appreciate the stark mathematical precision of Berg’s musical language and the dark brooding theatrics of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.

Vilde Frang is the soloist for the Berg Violin Concerto. Classical music academics did Berg’s most performed concerto a disservice for years by emphasising the composer’s rebellious compositional strategy to a generation of A Level music students, making the work feel impenetrable when it is heard afresh, thirty-five years on, anything but.

Berg wrote using a twelve-tone technique — a method that organises all twelve notes of the scale into a fixed sequence, sidestepping the familiar gravitational pulls of traditional harmony. On paper, it sounds clinical. Listening to it now, it sounds like daring vulnerability of the kind Brene Brown would happily salute, cocooned in a mathematical coat. Sophisticated pepper-haired introspection. Two movements of gradually, imperceptibly ramped-up tension resolved in the final bars in the most exquisite of underplayed climaxes. On the strength of what Frang did with Korngold in Edinburgh last year, Berg’s far more demanding work is in safe hands.

Review

This review will be published following the concert.

Gallery

Photography will be added once available.