Currently studying Music at the University of Bristol, Simon is a musicologist and composer with a particular interest in raising the profile of classical music to a wide range of people and promoting contemporary composers.
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra began what promised to be an excellent programme with a simple Romantic work from Richard Strauss, Traumerei am Kamin (“Dreaming by the Fireside”).
The evening’s music commenced with Ligeti’s Night; Morning, one of the composer’s last works before his emigration to the West. Although only a very short piece, it exhibits some of the compositional approaches that are now synonymous with Ligeti’s style.
I had never heard any of the music scheduled the evening’s performance and so I was excited by the prospect of the all-French programme, featuring composers whose music I am particularly fond of.
It is quite a daunting task to assess the performance of someone like John Williams. Certainly one of the finest and most famous living classical guitarists in the world, he seems something of a colossus of the instrument. Yet the manner he exuded as he entered the stage of St. George’s was of understated familiarity.
If there would be one piece to show someone asking “who is Mahler?” the third symphony would undoubtedly be my first choice. Though it does not perhaps reach the heights of expressionism of some of his later symphonies, it perfectly exemplifies everything Mahler’s music is about: contrast between emotional extremes, ingenuitive orchestration, and a juxtaposition of the sublime and trivial.
Prom number 40 saw a Russian conductor at the helm of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, playing a selection of music from some of the great Russian composers of the last two centuries, all with very distinct styles. Rimsky Korsakov’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain began the concert and conjured up all the fantastical imagery the name promises.
