Photos and reactions: The RPO's sell-out return to the BBC Proms

On Sunday 16 August we returned to the world's biggest classical music festival with a sold-out performance conducted by our Music Director Vasily Petrenko. Featuring in the programme was Webern's Passacaglia, Walton's Symphony No.2 and Elgar's Cello Concerto with soloist Pablo Ferrández, who made his BBC Proms debut.

You can listen back to this richly expressive music from the twentieth century on BBC Sounds, and see photos and reactions from the evening below.

The concert began with Webern's Passacaglia, his first published composition, which was greatly influenced by his teacher, Arnold Schönberg, and also pays homage to the passacaglia in Brahms' Fourth Symphony. Originating from the Baroque period, a passacaglia is a continuous set of variations that plays over a repeating bass line in triple time.

We were then joined by celebrated cellist Pablo Ferrández for Elgar's Cello Concerto. Elgar was suffering from a creative drought as the destructive power of the First World War rolled relentlessly on from 1914, but while recovering from an operation to remove his tonsils in early 1918 he asked for a pencil and paper and sketched down the now-instantly recognisable opening theme. He completed it while staying in the South Downs in rural Sussex with his wife Alice and daughter Carice later that year, and the concerto is regarded as the pinnacle of English late-Romanticism.

Pablo played Catalan cellist Pau Casal's arrangement of the traditional folk tune Song of the Birds for the encore.

The evening ended with William Walton's Symphony No.2. Like Elgar, Walton only ever composed two symphonies, and the second was commissioned for the 750th anniversary of the city of Liverpool in 1957, but he missed the deadline by three years, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra performing the premiere in September 1960. Written 25 years after his First, Walton's skill in composition had become more refined and emotionally restrained, and readily incorporated the sound-world of the Mediterranean, where Walton now lived. Although criticised in his day for sounding out of touch with many of the musical developments of the first half of the 20th century, the finale of the symphony acknowledges the music of Schönberg and the atonalists with passacaglia and variations upon a 12-tone theme.

Thank you to all who joined us at the BBC Proms. We’ll be back at the Royal Albert Hall with Vasily Petrenko and Pablo Ferrández for our 80th anniversary celebration on Wednesday 23 September, playing music by Strauss, Beethoven and Errollyn Wallen.

Missed the concert, or just want to experience it all over again? Listen to the broadcast on BBC Sounds.