Critically acclaimed Finnish conductor continues his Barbican series as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with internationally renowned soloists including violinist Lisa Batiashvili and pianist Bertrand Chamayou.
Orchestra and conductor will perform in London on Friday 30 January, following a concert at The Anvil in Basingstoke on Thursday 29January with Hana Chang performing Brahms’ Violin Concerto. Both performances begin with Cecilia Damström’s ICE, a 10-minute work of remonstration and recuperation, commissioned in 2021 for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra to mark Lahti’s year as Green Capital of Europe. Damström’s work confronts the consequences of climate change, taking its lead from the melting polar ice and the foreshortening of winters in the northern hemisphere. The programme also contains Beethoven’s joyful Symphony No.4 and in London, Detlev Glanert’s three-movement Harp Concerto (2016-17). The latter, evocative of the instrument’s association with ancient myth and early Mediterranean civilisation, has been freshly revised by the German composer for the BBC SO’s principal harpist, Elizabeth Bass.
Magnus Lindberg’s Violin Concerto No.1 (2006) and Stravinsky’s ‘mélodrame’ Perséphone (1934), a work for speaker, solo voices, chorus and orchestra to a libretto by André Gide, provide fascinating companion pieces for the BBC SO’s next Barbican concert with Oramo on Friday 6 February. “I performed Perséphone in Birmingham and remember it very fondly,” says the conductor. “It’s a very different kind of Stravinsky piece, lyrical and beautifully crafted. Its aura is different from almost anything else we know from him. One could say it’s almost Neo-Romantic, especially in some passages that call to mind his ballet The Fairy’s Kiss. And Magnus Lindberg’s magnificent First Violin Concerto is already a classic. Even though the orchestra is small, it’s notoriously difficult to balance because of how sonorously it is written. Our soloist Lisa Batiashvili has played it many times, and she and I recorded it together with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2007.”
Works inspired not by a changing climate but by a change of scenery occupy the programme of Oramo’s next Barbican outing on Friday 6 March. Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No.5 ‘Egyptian’, with Betrand Chamayou as soloist, reflects its composer’s love for the sights and sounds of north Africa, while the genial warmth of Brahms’s Symphony No.2 is rooted in his visit to the Austrian lakeside resort of Pörtschach am Wörthersee in the summer of 1877. ‘Chamayou never loses sight of the fact that this is a virtuoso piano concerto,’ noted Gramophone in its rapturous review of the French pianist’s recording of the ’Egyptian’ Concerto.