Proms 2015 Prom 62: Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment performs Brahms

Proms favourite Marin Alsop returns prior to her second Last Night appearance for an all-Brahms evening. The Academic Festival Overture is an ebullient work the composer himself described as ‘a very boisterous potpourri of student songs’, and there’s also a rare opportunity to hear the epic Triumphlied – celebrating German victories in the Franco-Prussian War in choral settings of striking power and vividness. American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, winner of the 2013 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, is the soloist in Brahms’s glorious Alto Rhapsody, and completing the concert is Brahms’s First Symphony – a work nicknamed ‘Beethoven’s 10th’ for its obvious debt to the elder composer.