Piano and organ

The centrepiece of this Prom by the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra and Han-Na Chang is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Vivid with textural contrasts and sudden surging climaxes, it is matched for drama by Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto – a Proms favourite, with a slow movement that burns with restrained passion.

The young British pianist performs a programme with a dance theme pulsing through it. Chopin’s stately Ballade No. 1 gives way to the dizzying virtuosity of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, before the waltz returns, transfigured, in Liszt’s Waltz from ‘Faust’. Mompou’s Paisajes transports us to Barcelona, and Grosvenor also premieres a new work by Judith Weir.

Pianist Louis Schwizgebel and the dynamic Royal String Quartet are the key players in a concert that culminates in Richard Strauss's richly nostalgic Metamorphosen, heard in an intimate arrangement for string septet. Alongside it are Mahler's contemplative Piano Quartet movement and Mozart's elegantly poised Piano Sonata in D major, K311.

Rameau’s opera Les Indes galantes and Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben were notorious flops at their premieres, yet both are now recognised as peaks of their genre. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra take us from 18th-century France to fin-de-siècle Germany (with a quick stop-off in Chelsea, where the 8-year-old Mozart composed his First Symphony) in a concert that also includes the UK premiere of Bernard Rands’s Piano Concerto.

In the first of two concerts with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Principal Conductor Thomas Søndergård directs the first of two great Scandinavian symphonies. Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony explores a bleakness that is also at the core of Strauss’s great tone-poem Tod und Verklärung. The ‘complicated nonsense’ of Strauss’s youthful Burleske and Mozart’s sunny Rondo in A major complete the concert, both featuring pianist Franceso Piemontesi.