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Gerstein plays Busoni’s Piano Concerto

BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oramo

Kirill Gerstein

Expect epic visions and piano playing that’s out of this world when Kirill Gerstein and Sakari Oramo champion Ferruccio Busoni’s stupendous Piano Concerto, as well as music by Grazyna Bacewicz. 

'Joy and pain interweave in the light of the world…Thousands of years flash by with glory and strength, revealing that which is indestructible'. 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 Oramo’s determined to bring into the daylight. 

This performance will finish at approximately 9.30pm. 

Produced by the BBC Symphony Orchestra

£10

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Subject to availability

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Subject to availability.

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