Join the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios for a concert of music by women composers for broadcast on International Women’s Day (Sunday 8 March) on BBC Radio 3.

The conductor is Stefan Solyom, Principal Conductor and Artistic Adviser of the Helsingborg Symfoniorkester, Sweden, and Romanian pianist Alexandra Dariescu also makes a return visit.

There are two UK premieres: sparky Firelights by Elisabetta Brusa, and Victoria Borisova-Ollas’s dream-like soundworld in The Kingdom of Silence which explores, says the composer, “that mysterious country where we all should go to after our lifetime”.

Alexandra Dariescu is the soloist in the richly inventive Ballade for piano and orchestra by Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983), the only woman member of Les Six, the group of composers in 1920s Paris which included Poulenc, Honegger and Milhaud.

The concert finishes with Heroic: Strokes of the Bow by Judith Weir, Master of the Queen’s Music. This is the composer’s response to Paul Klee’s painting of the same name - “a blue and black painting on pink newspaper….which seems to show a simple pattern of violin bows and pegs against a hypnotic blue background.”

Programme:
Elisabetta Brusa Firelights
Germaine Tailleferre Ballade for piano and orchestra
Victoria Borisova-Ollas The Kingdom of Silence
Judith Weir Heroic Strokes of the Bow