Carnaval meets The Seasons: Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva

London Piano Festival curators, Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva open the 2025 festival with Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons and Schumann’s Carnaval. Alongside these programmatic gems, for the 10th Anniversary, we present two world premieres by British composers Cheryl Francis-Hoad and Elena Langer.

Robert Schumann conjures up an array of characters, both real and imaginary in his effervescent Carnaval. The music is filled with dance-like revelry, lyricism and sheer ‘joie de vivre’.

By contrast, Tchaikovsky’s imaginative series of twelve pieces describes the year’s journey in vivid sound pictures. Inspired by nature, scenes of country life and the ever-turning circle of the seasons.

Leading UK composers Cheryl Francis-Hoad and Elena Langer have responded to these iconic nineteenth century works with their own fresh take. Stones of the Sky by Francis-Hoad, draws joint inspiration from the gemstones found in the Austrian Alps and the Gem Poems by Pablo Neruda. Langer takes the poetry of Philip Larkin as a point of departure. Her newly created Seasons will be woven into Tchaikovsky’s original cycle.