Prom 39: R. Strauss, Rameau, Mozart and Bernard Rands

Rameau’s opera Les Indes galantes and Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben were both flops at their premieres, yet they soon won over a public suspicious of the new. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra tackles both works, taking us from 18th-century France to fin-de-siècle Germany – with a quick stop-off in Chelsea, where the 8-year-old Mozart composed his First Symphony. Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Jonathan Biss gives the UK premiere of Bernard Rands’s colourful new Piano Concerto, written for Biss himself.