Gardner conducts Rachmaninov

‘It was like sudden time in a world without time …’ When the LPO premiered George Benjamin’s Sudden Time in 1993, we launched a modern  British classic. Edward Gardner brings it home tonight, and joins Sergey Rachmaninoff in exile in America, grappling with the ghosts of an old world amid the energy of the new in his Symphonic Dances – arguably the greatest symphony he never wrote. First, though, comes Grieg’s Piano Concerto, as fresh and as tender as ever in the hands of the Norwegian keyboard-poet who might just be its finest living interpreter: Leif Ove Andsnes.