Monday 28 July 2025 at 7:30pm - 11:30pm

Beethoven & Birtwistle

Royal Albert Hall

BBC Proms presents: Beethoven and Birtwistle

Harrison Birtwistle’s monumental Earth Dances returns to the Proms for the first time this century. This contemporary orchestral masterpiece boasts tectonic shifts that surge and fissure with inexorable, elemental force.

Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra pair it with the mould- breaking orchestral pinnacle of another age. Grander than anything that came before, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the ‘Eroica’, ushers in Romanticism, revolutionising both the form itself and expectations of what a symphony can – and should – be. 

Programme

Birtwistle Earth Dances 38’ 

Interval

Beethoven Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, ‘Eroica’ 47’

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 

Ryan Wigglesworth conductor