27.10.2017
Barbican Centre, London
Two symphonies written 50 years apart, and perfectly complementary, bookend two great French works for piano and orchestra played by a master.
César Franck’s once hugely popular Symphonic Variations are paired with Ravel’s inventive Concerto for the Left Hand, both works played by the award-winning Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, a pianist with an innate and wonderfully natural feeling for French music.
They form the heart of a programme that opens with Florent Schmitt’s last work, his Second Symphony of 1957, a piece of luxuriant orchestration with a battery of percussion – a captivating follow-up to last season’s performance of Schmitt’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Sibelius’s Third makes a perfect complement to the Francophone tone of the programme, a work of almost classical poise and scale; another staging post in Sakari Oramo’s Sibelius symphony cycle.
Programme
Florent Schmitt
Symphony no. 2, op. 137
César Franck
Symphonic Variations
Maurice Ravel
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
Jean Sibelius
Symphony No 3 in C major
Performers
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo conductor
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet piano