NSOI: Leonard Slatkin conducts McTee, Mozart & R. Strauss
National Symphony Orchestra Ireland
Leonard Slatkin, conductor
David Fray, piano

Cindy McTee Timepiece (Irish Premiere)
Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20
Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life)

National Symphony Orchestra Ireland favourite, Leonard Slatkin, launches the new season in style, bringing with him ‘pianism of the highest class’ (The Guardian) from young French virtuoso David Fray.

Moving from brooding menace to helter-skelter drama, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 brilliantly contrasts volcanic outbursts of orchestral energy with dazzling grandstanding displays by the piano.

Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) is a self-portrait in the heroic style, teeming with incident and vitality. One of the last great flowerings of musical Romanticism, and one of Strauss’s most popular works, it’s a game of spot the theme with more than 30 quotations from his earlier works

Cindy McTee’s exhilarating Timepiece, ‘an engaging, pulsating, grooving’ (Los Angeles Times) showpiece receives its Irish premiere. Echoes of Bernstein, Mahler and Philip Glass can be heard in rhythmically alert music where, McTee says, ‘discipline yields to improvisation, and perhaps most importantly, humour takes its place comfortably alongside the grave and earnest’.