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The mighty Boston Symphony Orchestra returns to the Proms under Music Director Andris Nelsons for the first of two concerts – human resilience the theme. ‘I conceived of it as glorifying the grandeur of the human spirit,’ Prokofiev wrote of his Fifth Symphony, premiered in January 1945 at the start of the USSR’s successful final offensive against Nazi Germany. The defiant optimism of the finale is mirrored in Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Death and Transfiguration, in which a dying man gains a musical glimpse of eternity. Jointly commissioned by the BSO and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, of which Nelsons is also Music Director, Julia Adolphe’s Makeshift Castle offers a contemporary meditation on fragility and endurance.

Image: Andris Nelsons © Marco Borggreve