For its Barbican debut, multi-prize-winning Connaught Brass despatches season’s greetings in a cracker of a programme that gift wraps festive joy with interludes of serene reflection.
Following last year’s solo recital, accompanied by the perennially stylish Academy of St Martin in the Fields, pianist Khatia Bhuniatishvili returns for two strongly contrasted Mozart concertos.
A tribute to Sir Andrew Davis: Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus perform Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.
When memories turn into music, the personal becomes universal. Alban Berg was haunted by the death of a young girl: his Violin Concerto ‘to the memory of an angel’ distils pain into piercing beauty. Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen rose from the ashes of wartime Germany, asking difficult questions even as it lays bare its heart. Brahms, meanwhile, wrote his Second Symphony on the sunlit slopes of the Austrian Alps – but happy memories have their own truth, and Edward Gardner and violinist Isabelle Faust will bring the same insight and commitment to every note, whether tragic, troubled or glowing with joy.
A musical odyssey with this superb young orchestra that opens with Britten’s ever-popular Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra before Wayne Marshall plays Gershwin’s showstopping Rhapsody in Blue the way Gershwin did – directing from the piano. They close the concert with the magnificent melodies of Holst’s masterpiece, The Planets.