BBC Symphony Orchestra chief producer Ann McKay looks forward to tomorrow’s awayday at the Brighton Festival. James Gaffigan conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, in Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Symphony No.2, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Brahms’s Symphony No.4
We’re honoured to be invited to take part in the Brighton Festival this year – it’s a brilliant, innovative festival and the Dome is a great venue to perform in. It isn’t the largest space, and so to ensure that everyone is comfortable on stage, we’re reducing our platform presence by one desk of strings - this makes for a more intimate experience for us and for the audience.
Our ‘seaside’ engagements usually take us to Snape Maltings and Brighton – we always hope for good weather but last time in Brighton there was a sea fog which rolled over the car park but didn’t get into the hall.
But that adds to the local colour and in our scripts we make a special point of reflecting the different places we go to – it’s about performing away from the studio and showing the vibrancy and special energy which inhabits every place we visit.
Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Brahms’s 4th Smphony are pillars of the classical repertoire and share a lyricism which is quite intoxicating. The Hartmann symphony will be new to most people – we performed it twice in the 1950s (before my time!) and I produced a studio recording here at Maida Vale in 2002 before – it was written between 1940 and 1944 as an Adagio for large orchestra, and revised as the Symphony No.2 – it’s jazz-influenced.
And we’re pleased to be working with conductor James Gaffigan for the first time; our violin soloist Veronika Eberle is a current Radio 3 New Generation artist.
The concert starts at 730, and there is a pre-performance talk with James Gafffigan at 615 in the Founder's Room.
Here’s a clip from Brahms’s 4th symphony which the orchestra are rehearsing in Maida Vale even as I write!
The BBC SO rehearsing Brahms's 4th Symphony at Maida Vale, with conductor James Gaffigan.
