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Details
St Alban's Church
Bayswater Road
Redland
Bristol
BS6 7NS
England
Programme
Benjamin Britten – Gloriana, symphonic suite, Op.53a
Gustav Mahler – Des Knaben Wunderhorn
~ Interval ~
Dmitry Shostakovich – Symphony no.9 in E flat major, Op.70
Performers
Daniella Sicari – soprano
Jonathan Eyers – baritone
Margarita Mikhailova – guest conductor
Bristol Concert Orchestra
Programme Note
Guest conductor Margarita Mikhailova directs Bristol Concert Orchestra in a thrilling programme bringing together coruscating works by three passionate outsiders: Gustav Mahler, master of the vivid and grotesque, and his two greatest twentieth-century successors, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich, who were close friends across the Iron Curtain.
Mahler's imagination was fired by the fantastical, macabre world of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn), an anthology of German folk poems. Margarita has chosen Mahler's pungent settings of six of them to interweave with movements from the rarely performed orchestral suite from Benjamin Britten's opera Gloriana.
Commissioned for the coronation of the second Queen Elizabeth, Gloriana is about the First. Britten focuses on the doomed infatuation of the declining queen with the young Earl of Essex, whose reckless overreach provokes his execution. The suite is a brilliant 1950s reimagining of Tudor court music.
Our final work, Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony, has jeopardy too. Expected to produce a big bombastic 'ninth', celebrating Soviet victory over Hitler, Shostakovich instead wrote such an irreverent, disconcerting work, obstensibly following the symphonic conventions while guying them, that the performances were banned until after Stalin's death.
Join us for an exhilarating, edgy evening in the company of three of the most dazzling orchestral composers.
