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A musical snapshot of 1945 – a world emerging from the haze of war into the neon glow of Hollywood and new-found hope. Three contrasting works sum up the spirit of this charged year: Britten’s Peter Grimes, reinventing English opera; Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, striving after the ‘grandeur of the human spirit’; and Korngold’s Violin Concerto. Hailed in his youth as a ‘genius’ and a ‘miracle’ by no lesser figures than Mahler and Puccini respectively, Korngold’s reputation still rests mainly on his luscious film music. The Violin Concerto combines his instinct for melody (themes are borrowed from four of his finest film scores) with classical virtuosity and structural elegance. The soloist here is Proms regular Nicola Benedetti, a passionate champion of this unaccountably neglected work.