Is it even possible to propose a more glitzily glamorous-sounding event than the InClassica International Music Festival in Dubai? Always a vibrant-sounding mix of rising and major international soloist talent, which for the current 2025 edition includes violinist Maxim Vengerov, pianists Mikhail Pletnev and Denis Kozhukhin, and cellist Gautier Capuçon. For host venue, the huge, sleek, dhow-shaped, palm-tree-surrounded Dubai Opera, one of this architecturally-bonkers city’s genuinely elegant buildings, nestled right beneath the Burj Khalifa and overlooking the famous fountains. And when you’re lucky, the latter’s lights-and-music spectacles coincide with concert interval time, making it two shows for the price of one. Equally glorious is the April weather: hot but not yet unbearably so by day, followed by gloriously dry and balmy evenings.
The two resident orchestras for 2025 similarly represent on paper a not-unpromising balance of solid reputation with under-the-radar interest: the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the smaller, Barcelona-based Franz Schubert Filharmonia – a privately-financed orchestra whose closest UK equivalent might be the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra.
More bemusing to anyone new to InClassica is that, as with previous editions, all 16 of the 2025 edition’s nightly concerts (12 symphonic, four chamber) showcase a work by the festival’s permanent Composer-in-Residence, Alexey Shor, including all 12 concerto slots – a programming strategy that isn’t going to win any awards for variety. Still, when Shor’s music is popping up increasingly on concert programmes beyond Dubai, InClassica 2025 represents a golden opportunity to get a thorough, concentrated flavour of this relative newcomer’s compositional voice. Which is well worth doing, given what an intriguing figure the 55-year-old cuts.
Ukraine-born and US-raised, Shor never learned an instrument as a child, training instead as a mathematician, before working first as an academic and then at a hedge fund. Only in his mid-40s did he switch careers to composing, self-taught, and his instrumental skills remain rudimentary (a little piano). Yet, in the words of Bringing Music to Life – the coffee table book presented to InClassica’s visiting journalists this year, in which top musicians themselves wax lyrical about his compositions – Shor is now “one of the most prolific and influential composers of his era”.
All told, touching down in Dubai to review InClassica’s first three nights, there was much to be intrigued and excited about. And things became no less intriguing at the Opening Concert starring the Franz Schubert Filharmonia – in Dubai with its founder Music Director Tomàs Grau, but for this concert under the guest baton of rising British conductor John Warner.
This was not an easy gig for a young conductor: an unfamiliar orchestra whose playing turned out to be technically competent, but never sounding as though its musicians were playing with each other, or even truly fired up; the sweeping 2000-seat hall sporting the sort of dry acoustic particular to modern, multi-purpose performance venues; also, barely a third of its seats filled. The audience itself, on the one hand applauded everything – individual movements of a work, and on the two subsequent nights even the orchestra tuning-up – but spent much of the actual performances scrolling on their phones, despite the best efforts of hall staff with infra-red pointers. Nevertheless, following slightly uncomfortably tentative and drawn-out opening chords, the Filharmonia’s opening Mozart Overture to The Magic Flute was neat and sprightly, and rewarded with enthusiastic slow-clapping that required a baffled but amused Warner to make an extra curtain call.
Next up was Shor’s Second Violin Concerto Phantasms, a 2018 work described in the concert notes as “emphasising flowing melodies and traditional themes”, which turned out to be a highly distinctive piece of writing. On the one hand, its three programmatically titled movements – Dance of the Graces, Elegy and Flight of a Falcon – sounded in their bel canto-esque soloist virtuosity and buoyant, four-square melodicism, like a rough homage to Donizetti and Paganini, with some more modern film-style language thrown in. Yet how this was spliced together was entirely unique: unexpected melodic and harmonic twists, turns and fizzlings out; high-contrast juxtapositions of dynamics; a very present percussion section featuring chipper xylophone colour; limited formal architecture, or development of material.
This was no easy score to shape and navigate, but Warner locked horns with it with energy. Roman Kim meanwhile was also working hard on the bravado-filled solo writing, itself replete with rapid, leaping passagework not always idiomatic to the violin. Kim’s instrument never really tonally shone and projected, but there were happy faces when it was time for applause and flowers, including from Shor himself.
Finally, Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3 “Eroica” saw the orchestra display a bright, proud sound in moments of forte grandeur, even if the tentativeness also reappeared in places – and met with cheers and applause that would have brought the house down, had it come from a sell-out crowd.
The second night brought the first turn from the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra – although not with its young Chief Conductor Andrea Battistoni as billed, but Conrad Van Alphen, Battistoni having suddenly become indisposed. Verdi’s Overture to Nabucco was the opener, and having been thrown together at the last minute, it was perhaps understandable that the orchestra and conductor weren’t quite gelling. Still, the audience enthusiastically slow hand-clapped before they’d even played a note, and then rewarded what was a rather dutiful reading overall (albeit with some perky marching) with a veritable explosion of whoops and cheers.
The programme’s major event, though, was the world premiere of Shor’s Violin Concerto no. 7 featuring the young Italian winner of the 2021 Paganini Violin Competition in Genoa, Giuseppe Gibboni. Presented in the programme as “a composition that skilfully blends modern and traditional elements, providing a rich, emotionally instigating experience for both performers and audiences,” this three-movement work again looked back to early 19th-century virtuoso melodicism, seasoned with more a modern, filmic language, while reprising many of the Second Concerto’s defining structural and colouristic elements. Among striking – and strange – percussion colours were clanging bells. There was a brassy march; and indeed the orchestra’s brass worked hard throughout, throwing themselves into their leaping figures, and doing their level best with one particularly striking first-movement passage which saw them engaged in a clunky-sounding rapid call-and-response exchange with Gibboni.
Gibboni himself meanwhile gamely raced and glissandi’d his way through his own minefield of technical challenges, which as with Shor’s Second Violin Concerto didn’t always leave much space for his instrument’s natural qualities to shine, but provided plenty to marvel over. At moments, he and the orchestra were out of step with each other, but this hardly mattered. It was sad that his choice of encore, Paganini’s famously fast and difficult Caprice no. 5 proved disappointing – treated as merely an exercise in speed, rather than with its musical phrasing coaxed out.
Van Alphen’s Schubert 9 also caught the speed-demon bug, and while his swift tempos proved a fabulous vehicle through which to admire especially the orchestra’s first violins, who put some precise, gritty elbow grease into its Scherzo, the whole ultimately felt one-dimensional.
The Franz Schubert Filharmonia returned on night three, now reunited with Grau, and with a corresponding uptick in conviction in their opening Beethoven Egmont Overture, even if they weren’t always tightly together.
The programme’s highlight, though, was unquestionably Shor’s three-movement Cello Concerto no. 3, due to it featuring the first major soloist so far, French cellist Edgar Moreau. Described in the notes as “a modern work combining a tonal palette with expressive contrasts that showcases the cellist’s technical prowess and emotional depth,” the work in fact presented little to challenge Moreau on the technical front. He also got more than a soloist’s fair share of countermelody. Yet what he himself brought was a new level of tonal beauty, musical vitality and conviction.
Plus, with familiarity with Shor’s sound-world growing, there was new entertainment to be had in spotting his linguistic leitmotifs such as extreme melodic simplicity – not least in its faintly Tchaikovsky-esque third movement. Twinkly percussion, further clanging bells, a march, an arch waltz, sharp dynamic contrasts… Even with the direction of the melodic and harmonic writing still keeping the listener on one’s toes with its sheer erraticness, it was possible now to identify a motif that was about to be sequentially treated. And all to the tune, mercifully, of Moreau’s fine sound.
After the interval, Grau and the orchestra gave us a rather tentative (that word again...) and emotionally removed reading of Tchaikovsky’s by-turns bleakly turbulent and warmly lyrical “Fate” Symphony no. 4 in F minor – but so pleased the audience with it, that its pizzicato-dominated Scherzo needed to become the surprise encore in response to their standing ovation.
All in all, these first three nights at InClassica could be perhaps best described as a story of swings and roundabouts. One suspects that the later violin and piano recitals in particular will be very fine indeed, coming from the likes of violinists Daniel Hope with Behzod Abduraimov, and Daniel Lozakovich with Mikhail Pletnev. Still, this was a visit over which the recurrent question was, why...? Why was such-and-such a performance just not hitting the mark? Why go to a concert if you’re just not that into listening to it? Why an Alexey Shor work in each concert, every year? Why are major soloists even prepared to play it? That said, “Why?” is always an interesting question, interesting questions are a pleasure in themselves, and InClassica 2025 is certainly very, very interesting.
More details on InClassica International Music Festival.
This article was sponsored by the Classical Music Development Initiative.