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The Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein will launch his BRSO residency, not with a piano concerto, but with two works for piano and orchestra that beggar comparison in their virtuosity, witty playfulness and range of expression. Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934) and the 21-year-old Strauss’s Burlesque take listeners through a gigantic panoply of moods and sounds, from diabolical fury to saucy parody, from mighty upsurges to the most delicate of reveries. Just the right milieu for Kirill Gerstein, a straddler of musical eras, of classical music and jazz, and an artist of enormous flexibility and exploratory verve. To enrich the brew, Alan Gilbert, the principal conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, will present Schoenberg’s brilliant orchestration of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor. Schoenberg’s quip, that his arrangement is Brahms’s fifth symphony, is as cogent today as ever before.
The Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein will launch his BRSO residency, not with a piano concerto, but with two works for piano and orchestra that beggar comparison in their virtuosity, witty playfulness and range of expression. Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934) and the 21-year-old Strauss’s Burlesque take listeners through a gigantic panoply of moods and sounds, from diabolical fury to saucy parody, from mighty upsurges to the most delicate of reveries. Just the right milieu for Kirill Gerstein, a straddler of musical eras, of classical music and jazz, and an artist of enormous flexibility and exploratory verve. To enrich the brew, Alan Gilbert, the principal conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, will present Schoenberg’s brilliant orchestration of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor. Schoenberg’s quip, that his arrangement is Brahms’s fifth symphony, is as cogent today as ever before.
The popular “Watch This Space” series will kick off the new season with a tribute to the Twenties. It was an age of vibrant diversity in society and the arts: radio was born, and music faced a rich amalgam of contrasting currents, from the avant-garde to neoclassicism and jazz. Together with artist-in-residence Kirill Gerstein, the young German-Japanese conductor Erina Yashima will tackle the music of this exciting era. After studying at Berlin’s Hanns Eisler University of Music, she worked as an assistant conductor to such figures as Riccardo Muti in Chicago, Yannick Nézet-Seguin in Philadelphia and Zubin Mehta on the BRSO’s Asian tour of 2018. Beginning with the new season she will be the principal conductor of the Komische Oper in Berlin.
The première of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets russes in 1913, proved to be one of the greatest scandals in music history. This barbaric ritual of a heathen sacrifice to spring, the pounding steps and twitching movements of the dancers, and the radically modern score left the audience bewildered and outraged. Two weeks after this expressionistic explosion Diaghilev and his company mounted Debussy’s Jeux, a “poème dansé” with which the French master pointed his impressionist tone-colours in the direction of modernism. François-Xavier Roth places his BRSO concert entirely beneath the banner of the early 20th-century avant-garde by joining these two forward-looking ballet scores with Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, a late masterpiece in his revolutionary 12-note idiom, played by pianist Kirill Gerstein.
The première of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets russes in 1913, proved to be one of the greatest scandals in music history. This barbaric ritual of a heathen sacrifice to spring, the pounding steps and twitching movements of the dancers, and the radically modern score left the audience bewildered and outraged. Two weeks after this expressionistic explosion Diaghilev and his company mounted Debussy’s Jeux, a “poème dansé” with which the French master pointed his impressionist tone-colours in the direction of modernism. François-Xavier Roth places his BRSO concert entirely beneath the banner of the early 20th-century avant-garde by joining these two forward-looking ballet scores with Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, a late masterpiece in his revolutionary 12-note idiom, played by pianist Kirill Gerstein.