Last Night of the 2020 BBC Proms
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Dalia Stasevska, conductor

Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska is Chief Conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra (from the 2021/22 season) and Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Golda Schultz, soprano

The Marriage of Figaro (Overture)

    ‘Deh vieni, non tardar’

Richard Strauss
Morgen!

Andrea Tarrodi
Solus

(BBC commission: world premiere)

Stephen Sondheim
A Little Night Music – Night Waltz

     ‘The Glamorous Life’

Jean Sibelius
Impromptu for strings

Ralph Vaughan Williams
The Lark Ascending

Errollyn Wallen
Jerusalem - Our clouded hills 

(BBC commission: world premiere)

Henry Wood
Fantasia on British Sea-Songs

i. The Saucy Arethusa

ii. Tom Bowling

iii. Jack’s the Lad

iv. Sequence of sea songs from around the UK

v. See, the conqu’ring hero comes

vi. Rule, Britannia!

Edward Elgar
Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 in D major, 'Land of Hope and Glory' (arr. Anne Dudley)

Richard Rodgers
Carousel – 'You'll never walk alone'

Hubert Parry
Jerusalem 

Unknown
The National Anthem (arr. Britten)

In a year like no other, the Last Night of the Proms – always a celebration of world-class music-making across the season – reflects the many experiences and moods we have encountered during the current Covid-19 pandemic.

Finnish maestra Dalia Stasevska – the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor – presides over a specially adapted Last Night with no live spectators at the Royal Albert Hall but with millions listening and watching worldwide.

Excerpts from Mozart’s witty opera celebrating unwavering love leads to Strauss’s rapturous ‘Morgen!’, a wedding gift to his wife, opening with the thought that ‘Tomorrow the sun will shine again’.

There’s consolation in Sibelius’s serene Impromptu, a celebration of one of the great creative spirits of the past century – Stephen Sondheim – in his 90th-birthday year. There is the soaring violin of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending and birdsong also concludes Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi’s new commission (whose title, Solus, also acknowledges the loneliness of lockdown).

With rising star Golda Schultz and Proms regular Nicola Benedetti as soloists – as well as the usual Last Night favorites such as Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem – it’s a jubilant, socially distanced musical party designed to bring us all together.