Date
Wednesday 3 October 2012 at 7:30pm
Location
Barbican Centre
Silk Street,
London,
EC2Y 8DS,
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)20 7638 8891
Link
Description
Michael Zev Gordon Bohortha (Seven Pieces for Orchestra)
(BBC commission: world premiere)
Mahler Rückert Lieder
Shostakovich Symphony No 4
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Neeme Järvi conductor
Alice Coote mezzo-soprano
Shostakovich was never closer to the spirit of Mahler than in his phantasmagoric fourth symphony, written and withdrawn during Stalin’s Great Terror. The composer intended it to be his ‘Symphonic Credo’, and it’s a work with an astonishing spectrum of characters and styles, from satire to high tragedy, romanticism to grotesquerie all fuelled with a near-delirious life force. Shostakovich was fascinated by Mahler’s vast orchestra and extended forms, a world away from the transparent orchestration of his mini-psychodramas, the Rückert-Lieder, performed here by one of the UK’s most treasured mezzo-sopranos, Alice Coote. The concert begins with a seven-movement exploration of our awareness of time passing by Michael Zev Gordon. Bohortha is a tiny hamlet on the Cornish coast with no roads from it: in Gordon’s words, ‘a beautiful image of open-endedness’.
BBC SO Plus
Pre-concert talk, 6.00pm, Fountain Room
An introduction to the music in tonight’s concert
Line-up (6)
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