Marie Jacquot & Gautier Capuçon

Marie Jacquot & Gautier Capuçon

“Significant, original, mature in its form”: thus Hans von Bülow waxed lyrical at the young Richard Strauss’s Symphony in F minor. Before achieving worldwide fame with his tone-poems, Strauss wrote two classical four-movement symphonies rarely heard in today’s concert halls. Even the BRSO is giving its very first performance of the Second Symphony, a blend of youthful bravado and masterly craftsmanship. A biographical counterpart to this symphony is Elgar’s elegiac Cello Concerto of 1918-19, whose introverted orchestral sound and long, pensive melodic lines from the soloist exude an atmosphere of farewell and nostalgia. The French conductor Marie Jacquot, designated chief conductor of the Royal Danish Theatre Copenhagen, is using this programme to make her BRSO début. She will also introduce the audience to a piece by the Scottish composer David Horne: The Turn of the Tide, after a painting by John Duncan.

Beethoven Symphony No.9 with Marie Jacquot

Beethoven Symphony No.9 with Marie Jacquot

Beethoven Symphony No.9 with Marie Jacquot

Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra / Selina Ott / Marie Jacquot

Who is this formidable woman? It is clear that the former professional tennis player Marie Jacquot has been taking the stage by storm for a few years now. Hailing from France, she has been principal guest conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra since the 2023/24 season, and in the 2024/25 season she also takes on the role of chief conductor at the Royal Danish Theatre Copenhagen. Then, in the 2026/27 season, she is set to take up a new post as principal conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra. So we will certainly be hearing a lot more from her, as they say.

Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra / Selina Ott / Marie Jacquot

Who is this formidable woman? It is clear that the former professional tennis player Marie Jacquot has been taking the stage by storm for a few years now. Hailing from France, she has been principal guest conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra since the 2023/24 season, and in the 2024/25 season she also takes on the role of chief conductor at the Royal Danish Theatre Copenhagen. Then, in the 2026/27 season, she is set to take up a new post as principal conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra. So we will certainly be hearing a lot more from her, as they say.

Marie Jacquot Veronika Eberle Kristine Tjøgersen Sergei Prokofiev Camille Saint-Saëns

Between Trees was the international breakthrough for the composer Kristine Tjøgersen (b. 1982) from Oslo. The Norwegian Radio Orchestra premiered the orchestral piece and was selected as “most outstanding work” at the prestigious award ceremony International Rostrum of Composers. Among the trees in the forest, “it teems with roots connected in a network of fungal threads,” the composer says. “These threads connect trees and plants so that they can communicate - like the forest’s own internet.” The piece is rich in unusual instrument sounds and techniques. She continues: “Fungal threads grow in pulses, so there is a rhythmically pulsating life unfolding beneath our feet. The opening is therefore buoyant and airy, like communicating trees. We then move over the ground, and hear flapping wings and various birds.”When the Russian Revolution was a fact in 1917, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) left the eye of the storm, Petrograd (today’s St. Petersburg), and traveled to the far east, with a steam boat on the rivers Volga and kama towards the Ural Mountains. In these calm surroundings, he wrote his most famous work. There is little in the Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major that bears witness to the troubled times - perhaps excluding the wild second movement. The first and third movement contains some of Prokofiev’s most dreamy, romantic music, and some of his most memorable melodies.“I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have accomplished here, I will never achieve again,” Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) said about his Symphony No. 3 in C minor, the “Organ Symphony”, which premiered in London in 1886. This would be his last symphony and one of his most famous pieces.After growing up as a child prodigy on the piano, Saint-Saëns got the most prestigious organist job in France, at the La Madeleine church in Paris. The composer Franz Liszt heard him play there and called him “the world’s best organist”. Symphony No. 3 culminates in a powerful ending with piano and organ.