Baiba SKRIDE – violin
Conductor Andris POGA
Programme:
Sergei RACHMANINOFF – “Scherzo” in D minor
Benjamin BRITTEN – Concerto for violin and orchestra
Pyotr TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36
The artistic programme of the LNSO SUMMER HOUSE will be crowned each evening by a magnificent concert. On 21 August the LNSO under Andris Poga will play Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Scherzo”, and Baiba Skride will be the soloist in Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto.
The first half of the concert brings rarities. Britten wrote his Violin Concerto at the age of 25, and this brilliant work carries echoes both Spanish and Moorish, but above all it is a portrait of an age painted on a broad canvas, pointing to the war in Spain and to a Europe on the brink of the Second World War. Before it comes Rachmaninoff’s earliest surviving orchestral work – an appealing scherzo written in his student years. The second half, meanwhile, offers a symphonic hit: Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, stamped with fate and melancholy and wreathed in capricious arabesques and the irrepressible high spirits of a village festival.