Buscador de artículos | Simon Birch

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”).

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.

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.

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.

The evening’s music started with a piece I hadn’t heard before: Johan Svendsen’s Carnival in Paris, Episode for Orchestra Op.9.

If there were to be one orchestra that is essentially a “dream team”, the World Orchestra for Peace would surely be it.

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.