Prom 23: Swan Lake

The BBC Philharmonic and Principal Guest Conductor Ben Gernon open with Malcolm Arnold’s dramatic Peterloo Overture in the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre at St Peter’s Fields in the orchestra’s hometown of Manchester. Excerpts from Swan Lake, the first of Tchaikovsky’s great ballet scores, include the colourful sequence of national dances and the heartbreaking final scene in which Odette and her beloved Siegfried are united for ever in death, breaking the spell of the sorcerer Rothbart. Russian virtuoso Alexander Gavrylyuk returns, following his Proms debut in 2017, as soloist in Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, with its famous lyrical 18th Variation.