For his or her collection Lights within the Darkish on the Royal Competition Corridor (with two concert events on the Royal Albert Corridor), the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and music director Vasily Petrenko discover the various methods by which composers have responded to the existential menace of warfare and the struggling unleashed by oppressive regimes. The collection opens on 26 January 2025 with Berg’s Three Items for Orchestra, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5 ‘Emperor’, with Paul Lewis as soloist, and Stravinsky’s The Ceremony of Spring. Each Berg and Stravinsky have been each booed when these items have been first performed, while it’s usually straightforward to neglect that Beethoven’s concerto was written in the course of large-scale battle.
On 23 March, the programme combines three actions from Korngold’s The Sea Hawk Suite, Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, with Bruce Liu as soloist, and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. All three composers ended up fleeing their properties due to politics. Rachmaninov fled the Russian Revolution and his Rhapsody displays his itinerant life as a virtuoso pianist, written in Switzerland, premiered in America and suffused with the Russia that had gone with the Revolution. Korngold travelled to Hollywood on the request of Max Reinhardt to work on the movie of A Midsummer Evening’s Dream. After a couple of movies, Korngold grew to become disillusioned and deliberate to return residence, however information of the Anschluss meant that Jew, return to Vienna was not doable. Bartók equally fled Fascism and sought refuge in America however like Rachmaninov, Bartók discovered his new life a problem. His Concerto for Orchestra, written right now, partially displays this.
Different programmes embody Sibelius’s Finlandia, Weill’s 4 Walt Whitman Songs, with baritone Roderick Williams, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No.7 ‘Leningrad. Shostakovich’s was written in the course of Hitler’s siege of Leningrad while Sibelius was writing when nascent Finnish nationalism was defying Russian Imperialism. Weill’s Whitman settings characterize the exiled composer addressing his new residence.
There are additionally two concert events within the collection on the Royal Albert Corridor in Might. Richard Strauss’ An Alpine Symphony, written in the course of World Warfare I, is combines with music from one other exile, Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and Mussorgsky’s Footage at an Exhibition, while Strauss’ Don Juan is carried out with Sibelius’ Violin Concerto (with Maxim Vengerov) and Stravinsky’s full Firebird.
The collection concludes on 25 June on the Royal Competition Corridor with Dorothy Howell’s symphonic poem Lamia, written on the finish of the First World Warfare, and the Piano Concerto in One Motion by African-American composer Florence Value, a composer whose success in life was not mirrored in her enduring repute till her more moderen discovery. The third work within the programme is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.4, a piece the place we will, maybe, hear Tchaikovsky attempting to come back to phrases with being an outsider in Russian society.
Full particulars from the RPO web site.
