Dedicated to the Iranian women and those who died for freedom in their country
Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini
Hossein Pishkar conductor
Leonidas Kavakos violin
Witold Lutosławski
Musique funèbre for string orchestra (in memory of Béla Bartók)
Benjamin Britten
Sinfonia da Requiem Op. 20
Johannes Brahms
Violin Concerto in D major Op. 77
Dazzling light and deep darkness alternate in a programme that sees the return of Leonidas Kavakos with the Brahms Violin Concerto, a masterpiece of irrepressible melodic exuberance whose luminous vision of the world is dramatically counterbalanced by two rarely performed twentieth-century works, now dedicated to the plight of Iranian women: Witold Lutosławski’s Funeral Music, composed in 1954 in memory of Béla Bartók, and Benjamin Britten’s Requiem Symphony, submitted in 1940 for the Japanese government’s competition to mark the 2,600thanniversary of the founding of the empire. Rejected as inappropriate, the work was a revelation in New York, where it launched the theatrical career of the greatest English composer of the 20thcentury.
