Feats of Endurance at the Proms

When we think of endurance, typically our minds turn to athletes, sportswomen and men who drive all their energy and finely-honed skills in to races and matches. But what about the feats performed by musicians?

When Yo-Yo Ma picked up his bow at the Proms he embarked on a feat of serious strength, not to mention the mental agility involved in memorising all six cello suites with six movements each, performing them in front of an audience up to 6000-strong and transmitting a live broadcast on Radio 3. And Yo-Yo Ma is not alone.

We’ve picked out just a small number of the superb achievements by world-class musicians at this year's Proms.

When world-class cellist Yo-Yo Ma took to the stage to play all of J.S. Bach's Suites for solo cello back to back in a Prom that lasted over two and a half hours without a single interval, it was a culmination of 54 years of professional performance and countless hours of practising. Yo-Yo Ma has been playing Bach’s Cello Suites for
decades and in Prom 68 he brings his inimitable questing spirit and extraordinary musicianship to bear on some of the greatest music ever written for any instrument.

As a performer, he appears with the world's major orchestras, and performs a huge range of different styles of music. Yo-Yo Ma’s multi-faceted career is testament to his continual search for new ways to communicate with audiences. Whether performing new or familiar works for the cello, collaborating with colleagues for chamber music or exploring cultures and musical forms outside the Western classical tradition, he strives to find connections that stimulate the imagination.

Listen to Yo-Yo Ma's performance of all J.S. Bach's Cello Suites in Prom 68.

Alina Ibragimova is the solo performer who has appeared the most at this year's Proms. She has played in four concerts, including two very special Late Night concerts of solo J.S. Bach sonatas and partitas in Prom 19 and Prom 21, a Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in Prom 56 and a Vivaldi and Bach Violin Concerto in a chamber recital in Proms Saturday Matinee 3.

"I began to play Bach when I was at school and it was a struggle at first," says Alina Ibragimova, "It took a while to find what I wanted to do with the stylistic and expressive aspects. But I started to play Baroque violin and little by little I developed an approach that was close to me. I needed to live with the music for years and let it grow with me." With technically 17 years on the professional circuit, she is an acclaimed solo Bach violinist and has been praised with playing 'as naturally as if she’d grown up in the 18th century'.

Listen to Alina Ibragimova play the third movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E.

Leif Ove Andsnes's idea for a four-year-long Beethoven marathon crystallised in, of all places, a hotel lift in São Paulo! The background music in the lift was a continuous loop of Beethoven’s first two piano concertos and every time Leif Ove Andsnes got in the lift he encountered a different point in the music. “At first I thought this might become rather irritating, yet the opposite proved true, as I was struck time and again by the sheer originality and exuberance of Beethoven’s invention. There and then I decided the time was right to commit myself to an extensive exploration of the concertos, and came up with the idea of undertaking a four-year ‘journey’ with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, climaxing in a three-concert series at the Proms in 2015.”

What is extremely incredible is that not only did Leif Ove Andsnes play the piano for the entire cycle of Beethoven's Piano Concertos (challenge enough), but he also directed the Mahler Chamber Orchestra from the piano. Considering the amount of notes that Beethoven wrote in to the piano parts in his concertos this is no small or easy task. The epic finale to his 4-year-long Beethoven marathon was played out over Prom 9, Prom 10 and Prom 12.

Listen to Leif Ove Andsnes talk about his 'Beethoven Journey'.

The ‘Goldberg’ Variations are J.S. Bach’s mightiest keyboard work and are arguably the finest set of variations ever composed. Grammy Award-winning pianist Sir András Schiff is a titan of the keyboard who first encountered the 'Goldberg' Variations some 50 years ago!

Bach wrote the variations in the last decade of his life. It is thought that they were composed around 1741 for Count Keyserlingk, a notorious insomniac who desired pieces to be played by his court harpsichordist during the night. The grand work takes the listener (and pianist!) on a wonderful journey across 30 variations which exhaust all styles of technical ability and compositional design, starting at the very beginning with the simplest of arias as you can watch in the video clip above, incredibly pure in sound and beautiful in its simplicity.

Listen to the whole of the 'Goldberg' Variations in Prom 50 here.

In 2015 the Proms saluted Sibelius's 150th anniversary with a full cycle of all the Finnish composer's symphonies performed across Prom 40, Prom 42 and Prom 43. Celebrated Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä brought the cycle of seven symphonies to a close in Prom 43 with a whopping three symphonies in one Prom - that's an intense 81 minutes containing Sibelius's Fifth, Sixth and Seventh. Osmo Vänskä is an expert in the area of Sibelius with critically-acclaimed complete recordings of the composer's symphonies.

Thomas Dausgaard conducted Sibelius's First and Second Symphonies in Prom 40

All of Sibelius’s symphonies carry the unmistakeable imprint of the Nordic landscape. This final movement of his Fifth Symphony was always referred to by the composer as the ‘Swan Hymn’, in tribute to seeing 16 noble and radiant swans emerge in full flight and circle above him several times.

Listen to Sibelius's Symponies 1 and 2 in Prom 40.

Listen to Sibelius's Third Symphony in Prom 42.

Listen to Sibelius's Symphonies 5-7 in Prom 43.