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BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Radio 3 Live in Concert: BBC SSO - Janacek, Shostakovich

07/05/2015

BBC SSO - Janacek, Shostakovich

BBC Radio 3 - Radio 3 Live in Concert, BBC SSO - Janacek, Shostakovich

The BBC SSO and conductor Alpesh Chauhan in Shostakovich's 15th Symphony.

The BBC SSO and conductor Alpesh Chauhan perform Janacek's Sinfonietta and Shostakovich's 15th Symphony and Garrick Ohlsson plays that composer's First Piano Concerto.

Live from City Halls Glasgow

Presented by Jamie MacDougall

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Alpesh Chauhan perform an evening of vividly coloured orchestral music.

Shostakovich's final symphony, his 15th, seems to sum up much of the composer's life: but can also be seen as exploring new ground. In the midst of a rich web of musical quotations, references to Rossini and Wagner, sits music which encompasses the classicism of Mozart and Haydn and modernistic rhythmic invention and techniques of serialism. As always with Shostakovich the Symphony treads lightly, and heavily, between the forces of darkness and light.

From 40 years earlier, the composer's first piano concerto seems an altogether brighter affair - bursting with humour and wit. The soloists, pianist Garrick Ohlsson and BBC SSO principal trumpet Mark O'Keeffe, engage in sardonic exchanges in music full of jazz-inflected rhythms, dazzling colours, and trumpet fanfares.

And the concert opens with another fanfare, by a composer who seems to stand outside the usual categories of music history: Janacek. In his Sinfonietta, opening as it does with an unfolding fanfare of 12 trumpets, he creates by means of extremely compressed music a jewel-like work which references military bands and fairy tales as much as the titular musical form.

Janacek: Sinfonietta
Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No 1, for piano, trumpet and string orchestra

8.20 Interval

8.40
Shostakovich: Symphony No 15

Garrick Ohlsson (piano)
Mark O'Keeffe (trumpet)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Alpesh Chauhan, conductor.

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