Prom 67 - Janacek, Mccabe, Dvorak [BBC Proms]

Forest life abounds in this concert. Janacek's opera The Cunning Little Vixen was based on a newspaper comic-strip adventure, a story of forest-dwellers both animal and human, and nature's ever-turning circle of life and death. Some of Janacek's most engaging and luminous music was selected by the Czech conductor Vaclav Talich and re-orchestrated to form this suite.

John McCabe celebrates his 70th birthday in 2009, and the Proms marks it with a performance of his Horn Concerto, commissioned by the BBC in 2007. The soloist is David Pyatt, a past principal horn with the BBC NOW. It is a work infused with the shifting moods and smoky lines of West Coast jazz, but there is also a contrast between urban up-tempo sections and the slower pace of the rainforest soundscapes that open and close the concerto.

David Pyatt (horn)

BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Jac van Steen (conductor)

Janacek, arr. Talich: The Cunning Little Vixen (suite)

John McCabe: Horn Concerto (Rainforest IV).

BBC NOW/Jac van Steen. Janacek: The Cunning Little Vixen (suite). McCabe: Horn Concerto.

Dvorak wrote his Ninth Symphony during a three-year stay in New York during the 1890s. He wrote the title 'From the New World' himself on the front page of the score, and declared that it was in the spirit of Negro and Red Indian folk music. Dvorak stopped short of using any actual American melodies, but it is often said that the spiritual Swing low, sweet chariot appears tantalisingly close on the flute in the first movement.

It is also undeniable that in his Ninth Symphony Dvorak is longing for his native Czech heritage and its Bohemian melodies.

BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Jac van Steen (conductor)

Dvorak: Symphony No 9 (From the New World).

BBC NOW/Jac van Steen in Dvorak's Symphony No 9 (From the New World).