Salonen conducts Philharmonia Orchestra in London

Orango is an unfinished satirical opera by Shostakovich, sketched while he was writing Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. He and his librettists conceived ‘a political lampoon against the bourgeois press’ involving a human-ape hybrid (!), but when the librettists failed to deliver their script in time for the planned 15th anniversary of the Revolution, the whole thing was dropped. Of the projected Prologue and three acts, only the 40-minute Prologue was completed in piano vocal score, which was discovered as recently as 2004 in a Moscow archive and subsequently orchestrated by the British composer Gerard McBurney. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the world première with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in December 2011.


Concert performance in Russian with English surtitles


Part of Southbank Centre's The Rest is Noise, inspired by Alex Ross' book "The Rest is Noise"