What makes a great conductor? Musicality, ambition, fearlessness? Conductor Nathalie Stutzmann has these qualities by the bucket-load. We spoke to her recently about her return to the Barbican stage on Thursday 27 January with a programme comprising Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Ravel. Read on to find out more about what drew her in to the world of conducting, her concert routines and what she's looking forward to most in 2022.
London-based artist collective Tangram join us for their third Lunar New Year Premieres concert at LSO St Luke’s. Set up by yangqin player Reylon Yount and composer Alex Ho, who was part of the LSO Soundhub composer scheme in 2018/19, Tangram create new music exploring the relationship between China and the West. Sun Keting, whose work Erasure will be performed on the night, was on the Soundhub composer scheme at the same time as Alex.
In the lead up to the concert on Saturday 29 January 2022 at LSO St Luke’s, Tangram give us a glimpse of the celebratory spirit of the concert marking the Lunar New Year. We hear from commissioned composers Beibei Wang (BW), Vivian Fung (VF), and Tonia Ko (TK) about their favourite Chinese dishes, how they usually celebrate the new year, and a little about their music.
Composer Unsuk Chin’s first Violin Concerto was hailed as ‘the first masterpiece of the new century’, so the excitement about her new work is immense. Interviewer James Drury spoke to the composer about what inspired her new piece.
Unsuk Chin's world premiere will be performed by Leonidas Kakavos conducted by Sir Simon Rattle on Thursday 6 January at the Barbican and the concert will be available to watch live on Medici TV.
‘Melody is music,’ wrote Rachmaninoff, ‘the basis of music as a whole, since a perfect melody implies and calls into being its own harmonic design’. The Russian composer, pianist and conductor’s passion for melody was central to his work.
It is exactly this that we shine a light on in Rachmaninoff & Friends – our chamber music series from LSO St Luke’s with BBC Radio 3. In January and February we will hear music from Rachmaninoff and his contemporaries performed by Simon Crawford-Phillips and Philip Moore, Trio Wanderer, Olena Tokar and Igor Gryshyn, and Boris Giltburg.
