Marin Alsop conductor Robert McDuffie violin Joanna Woś soprano
Turnage Texan Tenebrae (UK première) Glass Concerto 2 for Violin and Orchestra: The American Four Seasons (European première) Górecki Symphony 3, ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’*
Witness a jazz-influenced UK première and a mind-blowing virtuosic European première alongside one of the best selling classical pieces of all time!
FREE Pre-concert Event 6.15pm-6.45pm | Royal Festival Hall Marin Alsop introduces the evening's programme.
Supported by The Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of POLSKA! YEAR
This concert will be broadcast at 7pm on Wednesday 21 April.
Mark-Anthony Turnage is the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Composer in Residence. His Texan Tenebrae is a slow and atmospheric single movement with soprano saxophones adding a distinctive jazz feel.
'Scored for a large orchestra, including tolling bells and rattling maracas, the piece is both a Texan soundscape and – as its title suggests – a taut meditation on a death [of model Anna Nicole Smith] that raised such a media furore.' The Times, January 2010
Philip Glass’s forty minute Concerto is a whirlwind of virtuosic magnificence, which like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons covers each of the seasons throughout the year. Don’t miss the soaring pyrotechnics in the first movement – or the ‘kick-ass ending’ that Robert McDuffie asked for when he persuaded Glass to write the concerto!
‘You might think that Beethoven would always get a bigger reaction from a symphony crowd than Philip Glass. But it was Glass, not Beethoven, whose music got the only standing ovation at Wednesday's concert by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’ The Globe and Mail, December 2009
The first performance of Glass’s Concerto ‘was so spectacularly played by the new piece's muse, American violinist Robert McDuffie...that the event turned into one of the most exciting musical evenings of the year.’ Toronto Star, December 2009
In 1992 Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony became a worldwide commercial success. It broke into the non-classical charts after a recording of the work was released to commemorate those lost in the Holocaust. It is a sorrowful, but captivating work evoking a feeling of timelessness as the strings play steadily moving chords underneath a sublimely expressive soprano voice.
Click here to watch a video of Górecki's Third Symphony.
Henryk Górecki - "Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music […] somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed."
Mark-Anthony Turnage introduces his new work in a short video made during rehearsals in January 2010.
Turnage’s new work is commissioned by the Festival de Música de Canarias, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Glass’s Concerto No 2 for Violin and Orchestra: The American Four Seasons is commissioned by the Toronto Symphony and London Philharmonic Orchestras, Aspen Music Festival and School, Krannert Center at the University of Illinois and Carlsen Center at the Johnson County Community College.
We are partnered for this concert by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska! Year festival in the UK. Following the tragic plane crash which killed the Polish President and Polska! Year Patron, Lech Kaczyński, this concert will now be dedicated to the memory of those who died.
*Please note the change to the previously advertised programme. Henryk Gorecki has, due to health problems, been unable to complete Symphony No.4, commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Southbank Centre London, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and Zaterdag Matinee Amsterdam.
CONCERT: Adams, Glass and Ravi Shankar Thursday 1 July 2010 David Murphy conducts Shaker Loops by Adams, Violin Concerto by Glass and the world première of Ravi Shankar’s Symphony.
CD: Mark-Anthony Turnage £9.99 Twice Through the Heart, Hidden Love Song and The Torn Fields by the Orchestra’s Composer in Residence Mark-Anthony Turnage.
CD: Mark-Anthony Turnage £9.99 Scherzoid, Evening Songs, When I Woke and Yet Another Set To by the Orchestra’s Composer in Residence Mark-Anthony Turnage.
