Two works written in the same year yet poles apart in style – in François-Xavier Roth’s words, ‘the post-Romanticism of Elgar combined with Bartók’s scary, strange, erotic, disturbing work’.
Sir Simon Rattle marries two works of extraordinary intensity, played back-to-back in just one hour in this early-evening Half Six Fix concert, and introduced on-stage by the conductor.
Marrying emotive force with theatrically, Sir Simon Rattle sheds light on a rarely performed Beethoven masterpiece and Berg’s lyrical Violin Concerto with Lisa Batiashvili.
The past and contemporary, romance and sarcasm, all meet in this concert, in music by Russian composers who reached back in history to say something new.
