Sir Simon Rattle, conductor / Leonidas Kavakos, violin / London Symphony Orchestra – Unsuk Chin, Sibelius & Bartók
Unsuk Chin, Sibelius & Bartók
Thu 6 Jan 2022 7.00pm - 9.00pm
Barbican Hall, London
Unsuk Chin Violin Concerto No 2, ‘Scherben der Stille’ (world premiere)*
Interval
Sibelius Symphony No 7
Bartók The Miraculous Mandarin – Suite
Sir Simon Rattle conductor
Leonidas Kavakos violin
London Symphony Orchestra
* Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.
The 2020s meet the 1920s, as Sir Simon Rattle conducts Sibelius, Bartók, and the world premiere of Unsuk Chin’s new Violin Concerto.
A new year, and a brand-new masterpiece from Unsuk Chin, the poetic, dazzlingly original musical mind behind the opera Alice in Wonderland. She’s called it Shards of Silence, and it prepares the way for a musical journey back to the 1920s – when Sibelius and Bartók found equally astonishing, equally uncompromising new ways of listening to the world.
This is Chin’s second violin concerto. Her first is already a modern classic, and she hadn’t planned to write another – but when she heard the playing of Leonidas Kavakos, she broke her own rule. Naturally, he’s the soloist for tonight’s world-premiere performance, and since history demands context (even while you’re making it) Sir Simon Rattle completes the programme with Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony and Bartók’s brutal, brilliant Miraculous Mandarin Suite.