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Britten and Mahler

London Symphony Orchestra/Semyon Bychkov

Semyon Bychkov

Semyon Bychkov and Janine Jansen bring us a concert of sorrow and triumph with music from Britten and Mahler.

Following her LSO Artist Portrait last season, Janine Jansen presents Britten’s Violin Concerto, a grief-stricken yet achingly beautiful violin-concerto-as-requiem, written in despair at the victory of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The work struggles between an encroaching darkness and that very last candle-flame of hope, which ever refuses to be fully extinguished.

With its huge emotional scope and large orchestral forces, Mahler’s Symphony No 5 is a real journey from tragedy to triumph. It opens in turbulent darkness and uncertainty, and closes with a vast exultant finale and an ecstatic riot of counterpoint, which ensues in the work’s final pages.

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