This Prom will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and live-streamed to BBC iplayer at 19:30 BST.

Please note that it will not be possible to have a live audience for this concert.

First heard at the Proms in 2017, the late George Walker’s hauntingly beautiful Lyric for Strings was written at the age of only 24 and dedicated to his grandmother.

Beethoven’s economically scored Second Piano Concerto – completed before his First and among the earliest of his works performed in concert halls today – looks both backwards to Haydn and Mozart and forwards to the Beethoven’s future innovation and rhythmic fascination.

Tonight’s BBC commission is from Glasgow-based composer Jay Capperauld. Expressed in the context of the recurring 24-hour process that regulates our sleeping patterns, Circadian Refrains (172 Days Until Dawn) is Capperauld’s response to the cyclical nature of lockdown, enforced as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Continuing the theme of mass upheaval, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra closes with Strauss’s devastating Metamorphosen. Written for 23 solo strings during the final months of the Second World War (which Strauss described as ‘the most terrible period of mankind’), it quotes from the Funeral March of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony (No. 3).

PROGRAMME

Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19 28’

Jay Capperauld
Circadian Refrains (172 Days Until Dawn) 8’
BBC commission: world premiere

Richard Strauss
Metamorphosen 26’

Stephen Hough piano
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Alpesh Chauhan conductor