Prom 60: Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra by Weill, Adès, Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff, Od (2023/2023), Dirigent Vladimir Jurowski, Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom

Rachmaninov’s 150th-anniversary celebrations continue with the composer’s final symphony, a work tinged with yearning. ‘Only one place is closed to me,’ Rachmaninov wrote after his exile in the USA, ‘and that is my own country, Russia.’ Following in the virtuoso tradition of Rachmaninov is Thomas Adès’s Piano Concerto, performed here by Kirill Gerstein, who gave the 2019 premiere. The work’s sardonic brilliance finds an echo in the suite from Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (‘The Threepenny Opera’), with its famous ‘Ballad of Mack the Knife’. Coming after last week’s visitors from Boston (where Adès’s concerto was premiered), tonight we welcome the esteemed Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra – 100 this year – making its Proms debut under Chief Conductor Vladimir Jurowski.