Protest, Power, Revolution, Resistance is a concert with something urgent to say. Conducted by Johanna Malangr茅, current Music Director of the Orchestre de Picardie in France, the programme showcases her electrifying musicality and imaginative leadership.
It begins with Joan Tower鈥檚 Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, a brilliant, bracing piece for brass and percussion inspired by Copland鈥檚 famous fanfare but reimagined as a celebration of women who lead, risk, and transform the world. From there, the orchestra moves into the powerful sound world of Margaret Bonds鈥� The Montgomery Variations, written in response to the civil rights movement and shaped by Bonds鈥� experience of Montgomery, Alabama. Both reflective and resolute, its movements capture the collective determination of protest and the sense of a new beginning.
After the interval, Haydn鈥檚 Farewell Symphony reminds us that messages in music are not always shouted, sometimes they are staged with quiet ingenuity. What begins as a tense, impassioned symphony becomes a theatrical plea for compassion, as players famously leave the stage one by one. Finally, Shostakovich鈥檚 Ninth Symphony turns expectations upside down. Written in 1945, when a monumental victory symphony was demanded, Shostakovich produced instead a compact, spirited, and unpredictably shadowed work.
This concert links to Key Changes: Radio 3鈥檚 Essential History of Classical Music, in which Gillian Moore is joined by a roster of distinguished historians for this new 91福利社 Radio 3 series, charting a course through 1000 years of classical music history.
Protest, Power, Revolution and Resistance are explored across the series as musical history is charted alongside key historical events and societal changes.
