Live Events
BBC Music Magazine’s choice of the best October concerts and operas, plus a guide to Rameau’s Pigmalion
The best concerts and opera near you
1 IMS PRUSSIA COVE Hall for Cornwall, Truro, 1 Oct Tel: +44 (0)1872 262466 Web: www.i-m-s.org.uk The International Musicians Seminar at Prussia Cove has been sharing its deliberations nationwide for 40 years, and to celebrate, Markanthony Turnage (below) has been commissioned to write a quintet for piano and strings. Premiered in the company of Mozart’s G minor Quintet, K516 and Schubert’s Trout Quintet, Turnage’s Prussian Blue journeys from Truro to Wigmore Hall via Wells, Stowe and Cambridge.
2 BOURNEMOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Lighthouse, Poole, 4 Oct Tel: +44 (0)1202 280000 Web: www.bsolive.com
Embarking on its 125th anniversary season, the Bournemouth Symphony is thinking big. Enlisting the seasoned expertise of ondes-martenot doyenne Cynthia Miller and pianist Steven Osborne, Kirill Karabits conducts Messiaen’s love song writ large: the Turangalîla Symphony. It’s paired with another French symphony, small yet perfectly formed – Bizet’s scintillating Symphony in C.
3 ENGLISH TOURING OPERA Hackney Empire, London, 4-7 Oct Tel: +44 (0)20 8985 2424 Web: www.englishtouringopera.org.uk
Director James Conway takes the bold step of dividing Handel’s opera seria masterpiece Giulio Cesare into two parts spread over two evenings – Part One encompassing ‘The Death of Pompey’; Part Two wittily dubbed ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’. And completing an allbaroque autumn tour is Rameau’s Dardanus given in its 1744 respray with tenor Anthony Gregory in the title role.
4 ROYAL SCOTTISH NATIONAL ORCHESTRA Caird Hall, Dundee, 5 Oct Tel: +44 (0)1382 434940 Web: www.rsno.org.uk
Fresh from an Edinburgh Festival collaboration with the Mariinsky Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra expands once more for a season-opening account of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The programme opens with the Scottish premiere of Gavin Higgins’s Velocity and Elgar’s Violin Concerto. Nicola Benedetti is the soloist and Peter Oundjian conducts.
5 LONDON PIANO FESTIVAL Kings Place, London, 5-8 Oct Tel: +44 (0)20 7520 1490 Web: www.kingsplace.co.uk
Following last year’s debut instalment, the London Piano Festival is back with a Russian flavour permeating a line-up that musters – among solo and duo recitals – a two-piano marathon for six pianists. New works by Elena Langer and Kevin Volans rub shoulders with Ravel and Shostakovich as Ilya Itin, Nelson Goerner and Melvyn Tan are among pianists joining artistic directors Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen.
6 BBC PHILHARMONIC Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 6 Oct Tel: +44 (0)161 907 9000 Web: www.bridgewater-hall.co.uk
The BBC Philharmonic’s chief conductor designate certainly earns his keep in a pairing of two major 20th-century works. Leading from the front, John Storgårds plays the violin in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, before taking up the baton for Shostakovich’s haunting meditation on death, the Symphony No. 14. The soloists are soprano Soile Isokoski and bass-baritone Stephen Richardson.