Classics B Series

Ecstasy and despair… adversaries at the heart of the Autumn Festival. It starts with Beethoven’s colourful interpretation of the Prometheus myth: humanity’s creation and its protector’s eternal punishment. Then Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, written in the passion and pangs of first...

Guest Maestro Jun Märkl, student of Bernstein, meets the WSO for an incredible evening of music making. Richard Strauss couldn’t resist a story. In Death and Transfiguration, a dying man, presumably Strauss himself, recalls the artistic ideals he didn’t achieve and as the fatal hour...

Mozart’s Fifth and final Violin Concerto is delightful in the bright key of A major, interpreted here by the Canadian virtuoso Alexandre Da Costa on the Devault Stradivarius – the perfect way to open the new year.

Harry Stafylakis’ “dreamy yet rhythmic” (NY Times) style is one...

Iberian dreams Guest conductor Yaron Traub, Music Director of the Orquesta de Valencia, directs a tour of Spain with french guitar virtuoso Gaëlle Solal. Gypsy castanets, flamenco guitar, jota dance, Iberian sunshine… an antidote to February’s fury. Manuel de Falla was the soul of Spanish...

Mélodie The exquisite Pie Jesu from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem guaranteed the composer immortality. Fauré wrote: “everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal...

Audacious Critics don’t like your work. What to do? Compose a huge symphony full of self-quotations and cast yourself as the main character. That is what Richard Strauss did in Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), “a monstrous act of egotism,”according to one reviewer. The result? A fabulous...