Sakari Oramo conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra

“Joy and pain interweave in the light of the world…Thousands of years flash by with glory and strength, revealing that which is indestructible”

1.11.2024

19:30

London

Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2

Music ,

Extraordinary claims; but then extraordinary is the only word for the heaven-storming choral finale of Ferruccio Busoni’s colossal Piano Concerto: a masterpiece on the scale of a symphony, composed in 1904 by one of Mahler’s greatest fans.

Every performance is a major occasion, demanding a pianist with outsize charisma and fingers of steel. Kirill Gerstein has both – and when he recorded this concerto with Sakari Oramo, Gramophone described the results as “sublime”. Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra open with the supercharged Second Symphony by Grazyna Bacewicz: the dazzling, neglected Polish composer whose music he’s determined to bring into the daylight.

BBC SO(Link to another website.)