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Prize-winning young Viennese pianist Lukas Sternath makes his Proms debut in Grieg’s beloved Piano Concerto, with its heart-on-sleeve melodies and intimate lyricism. The piece is framed by two musical products of war: a haunting elegy by Vaughan Williams’s pupil Ruth Gipps, inspired by a William Blake illustration of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and anniversary-composer Arthur Bliss’s The Beatitudes, a cantata composed for the reopening in 1962 of Coventry Cathedral – part Passion, part howl of human loss, part musical prayer for a ‘troubled world’.

Elizabeth Watts © Marco Borggreve