Santtu and Seong-Jin Cho

Award-winning pianist Seong-Jin Cho joins the Philharmonia in Shostakovich’s most playful concerto. 

Cho has gone from strength to strength since winning the International Chopin Competition in 2015. Performing with the Philharmonia at last year’s Edinburgh International Festival, he won praise for his ‘breathtaking nimbleness’ (The Scotsman). And nimbleness is exactly what’s needed for Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, which fizzes with energy and humour.

Santtu, the Philharmonia’s young Finnish Principal Conductor opens with Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony. Sibelius himself described it as ‘pure cold water’, in contrast to the ‘cocktails of every hue’ served up by more avant garde composers in the 1920s. But there’s plenty of warmth and cheerfulness in this symphony too. 

Shostakovich said he wanted his Sixth Symphony to convey ‘the moods of spring, joy, youth’. Perhaps he was thinking of the mood swings of adolescence – an introspective first movement gives way to a colourful and carefree Scherzo, then a frenzied finale.