A starburst of musical colour for the new year. Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune opened new worlds of sonic sensuality, while Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra launched dazzling sonic fireworks into the grey skies of postwar Poland. The LSO and conductor Alexandre Bloch present the two masterpieces to bookend a performance by pianist Alice Sara Ott – a regular guest of this orchestra, and a firm favourite of the Barbican audience. She plays the sunlit, jazz-flavoured G major Concerto by Maurice Ravel – and the concert ends with Ravel, too: his unforgettable evocation of a world dancing on the edge, La Valse. Music to thrill the ears and intoxicate the spirit. PROGRAM Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune; Ravel: Piano Concerto in G, La valse; Lutoslawski: Concerto for Orchestra
LSO: Gianandrea Noseda & Seong-Jin Cho
Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho and the music of Frederic Chopin – could there be a more instinctive pairing? Well, Cho has developed a special rapport with the London Symphony Orchestra, and his previous performances with the LSO’s principal guest conductor Gianandrea Noseda have been received with little short of rapture. Tonight, they rekindle the flame in Chopin’s impassioned Second Concerto; the luminous centrepiece of a concert that opens with Stravinsky’s colourful tribute to Tchaikovsky and ends with the high romance and epic adventure of Borodin’s Second Symphony – music close to the heart of the St Petersburg-trained Noseda. PROGRAM Stravinsky: Divertimento from ‘The Fairy’s Kiss’; Chopin: Piano Concerto No 2; Borodin: Symphony No 2
LSO: Pappano conducts Tchaikovsky and Vaughan Williams
Led by its superb chief conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, the London Symphony Orchestra invites a trio of soloists – violist Antoine Tamestit, soprano Julia Sitkovetsky, and bass-baritone Ashley Riches – to join them in an emotional and original program that pairs Tchaikovsky’s sweeping Romanticism with Vaughan Williams’s pastoral grandeur. Opening the program is the Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Two unjustly lesser-heard works by Vaughan Williams follow: first, Tamestit takes the solo role in Flos Campi, inspired by the Song of Solomon and written for the unusual combination of viola, small orchestra, and wordless chorus. Finally, Sitkovetsky, Riches, and the London Symphony Chorus perform the impassioned Dona nobis pacem, a fervent call for peace by a composer who had witnessed the senselessness of violence firsthand as a stretcher bearer in World War I and despaired to see the clouds of war gather anew in 1936. PROGRAM Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 4; Vaughan Williams: Flos Campi, Dona nobis pacem
Yuja Wang – The Berlin Recital
International sensation Yuja Wang releases a recital program of works by late Romantic-era and 20th-century composers, recorded live at the Philharmonie Berlin. Yuja always has been in love with Berlin as a center for music and culture. Since 2013 she has been a regular guest at the Berlin Philharmonie – performing concertos with the Berlin Philharmonic, the big solo pieces, but also chamber music. Yuja‘s stellar piano technique is matched by boundless imagination. This solo recital allows her to be her dazzling musical self – an unmissable experience for any piano lovers out there! Works by: Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Scriabin
LSO: Harding conducts Dvorak and Widmann
Voices of nature and fabulous tales: Daniel Harding and viola player Antoine Tamestit explore the imaginary realms of Jörg Widmann and Antonin Dvorák. With the music of Antonín Dvorák, there’s always something unexpected going on beneath the gloriously tuneful surface. A gothic Czech folk-tale takes on a truly universal resonance; and an open-hearted celebration of the Bohemian countryside blossoms into something rapturous, in colors reminiscent of Strauss or Mahler. And since Dvorák was a viola player, what better way to set the mood than with the Viola Concerto by Jörg Widmann – the 21st century’s most playful (and inventive) descendant of that great Romantic tradition? ‘Even with the viola’s C-string alone, you can tell stories unimaginable on any other string instrument’, he says, and he wrote this piece, especially for Antoine Tamestit. Music that dreams and then dazzles, performed by artists who just love the sound it makes. Program: Widmann: Viola Concerto; Dvorák: In der Natur, The Golden Spinning Wheel
LSO: Roth conducts Saint-Saens & Beethoven
Every revolution has its roots. The two explosive chords that open Beethoven’s Eroica symphony shook classical music to its foundations. For François-Xavier Roth, though, no artist operates in a vacuum, and tonight he places Beethoven’s era-defining masterpiece alongside the strikingly original music of one of his contemporaries from revolutionary France: François-Joseph Gossec. It’s a fascinating rediscovery – exactly what we’ve come to expect from a conductor as adventurous as Roth. Saint-Saëns’s Second Piano Concerto, on the other hand, needs no introduction: In the hands of the ‘simply formidable’ (The Guardian) Bertrand Chamayou, it’ll fizz like champagne. PROGRAM Gossec: Symphonie à 17 parties; Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No 2; Beethoven Symphony No 3 “Eroica”
LSO: Pappano conducts Ravel, Say & Rachmaninoff
A Dance to the Music of Time – Ravel, Say and Rachmaninoff. Spellbinding storytellers, dancing ghosts and melodies that will stay with you forever.The fairy-tale heroine Scheherazade must keep her audience entertained on pain of death in the One Thousand and One Nights. In Fazil Say’s concerto, the violin plays the part of the endlessly fascinating tale-teller. The piece is paired with impassioned music originally written for the ballet: Ravel’s haunting waltz and Rachmaninoff’s mysterious Symphonic Dances. Ravel imagined whirling couples in a Viennese concert hall in music that seems haunted by World War I. Rachmaninoff also conjures up a ghostly waltz, amid the expressive melodies of the last music he ever wrote. PROGRAM Ravel: La valse; Fazil Say: Violin Concerto (1001 Nights in the Harem); Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances
LSO: Rattle conducts Brahms and Shostakovich
It begins with the engines of industry: mechanical marches, pounding brass. An uneasy second movement, and then a nightmarish vision of life in Stalin’s Russia explodes in a frenzied succession of dance themes. Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony before its first performance, after hints that he was treading a fine line with the Soviet authorities. It shines on as an extraordinary vision of thwarted humanity. Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto with, and for, his friend, the virtuosic Hungarian musician Joseph Joachim, and its foot-stomping finale honours Joachim’s heritage. PROGRAM Brahms: Violin Concerto; Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4
LSO: Pappano conducts Boulanger, Barber & Rachmaninoff
The sun comes out in Lili Boulanger’s lively tone poem, and lyrical feelings bloom in music by Samuel Barber and Serge Rachmaninoff. D’un matin de printemps is one of the few glimpses we have of Lili Boulanger’s compositional genius, a sparkling miniature that leaves a lasting impression of spring. The emotional sincerity of Samuel Barber’s lyrical Violin Concerto cuts to the heart, its nervy third movement building up to a burst of feeling. And passion reigns in Rachmaninoff’s opulent Second Symphony. Its third movement contains some of the most beautiful music he ever wrote. PROGRAM Boulanger: D’un Matin de printemps; Barber: Violin Concerto; Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2
LSO: Nathalie Stutzmann conducts Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 and Te Deum
The obsessive Anton Bruckner worked on his Ninth Symphony for the last ten years of his life, but the concluding Adagio remained unfinished at his death in 1896. He is said to have suggested that his Te Deum be used in its place – and leaving aside the tonal shift from the D-minor symphony to a C-major hymn, it feels a fitting grand finale for the famously devout composer, who dedicated his last symphony to God. In a concert billed as A Blaze of Glory, the acclaimed Nathalie Stutzmann – who counts Bruckner among her three favorite composers to conduct – leads the London Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Chorus, joined by soloists Lucy Crowe, Anna Stéphany, Robin Tritschler, and Alexander Tsymbalyuk, in a program that represents no less than the culmination of Bruckner’s life’s work, a mighty and magnificent call to heaven itself.