Long-standing LSO cellist Jennifer Brown tells us about her career in music and how orchestral life has changed since the 1980s.
'I only encountered the Britten Violin Concerto for the first time in 2003, when I heard Maxim Vengerov and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich on the radio. I was mesmerised. Britten’s music was rather a late discovery for me, but it immediately spoke to me in an irresistible language that I had never heard before. I remember the feeling of despair and drama that came across – a romantic violin concerto in 20th-century language.'
After making history last year as the first woman to conduct the First Night of the BBC Proms, and now enjoying her first season as Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Karina Canellakis makes her way to the Barbican on Sunday 8 March for a lush programme of Ravel and Strauss. Ahead of the concert, we caught up with the conductor to chat about her concert season so far, her experience as a violinist-turned-conductor, and to hear her thoughts on the concert programme put together.
François-Xavier Roth explains why he's championing the music of under-celebrated French composer Paul Dukas
The idea of this programme is to focus on the work of a composer who is very famous and yet at the same time unknown. Dukas is such an important figure in music history – not just in France, but around the world. Unfortunately, he didn’t write very much, but what he did compose is brilliant, and influenced many other composers – Messiaen and Dutilleux, for example.
A composer whose music has been described as 'shimmering' and 'dramatic', Elizabeth Ogonek was a participant on the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme in 2013. At the end of her time on the scheme, she was commissioned to write a 10-minute composition, performed by the Orchestra in a main season concert of the Barbican stage. This year, once again, Ogonek's music finds its way onto the Orchestra's stands, as we perform her work All These Lighted Things, commissioned while she was Mead Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and premiered by the CSO in 2017. Here's a sneak peek of what's in store.
