Dalia Stasevska leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in London.
In Thursday’s (8/10) Guardian U.K.), Emily MacGregor writes, “You are rarely more than a few days away from a symphony at the Proms, but at the Albert Hall this coming week it is a particularly big one for the orchestral statement piece that’s been at the heart of the classical music tradition since, well, roughly the French revolution. On 13 August it’s canonic centerpiece Beethoven’s Symphony No 3, known as the Eroica (Heroic), then through the following week further crowd-pleasers Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10 and Mahler’s Third Symphony…. The program also features a symphonic gem composed by Croatian Dora Pejačević (1885-1923) during the first world war while she was working as a nurse, and a work that’s fresh off the press. How can this single form have had such an enduring hold over the imaginations of composers and audiences alike for (at least) two-and-a-half centuries?… Much of the reason the symphony has maintained such heft … is because it supposedly represents timeless values. It has a tricksy ability to tread a line between repelling meaning—i.e., it’s pure music, not about anything except music—and attracting meaning like iron filings to a magnet…. It is when symphonies succeed in tapping into a vision of our collective ideals—the society we would like to live in, the people we’d most like to be—that they really shine.”
