LSO: Thomas Adès’s 50th Birthday Concert, Barbican, streaming online from 6th March.
Thomas Adès (above) is a singular talent—a pianist, conductor and composer with Grammy and Olivier Awards to his name. He celebrates his 50th birthday with a little help from the London Symphony Orchestra. Adès will conduct soloist Kirill Gerstein in “In Seven Days”—Adès’s own “Concerto for Piano With Moving Image” that tells the story of the Creation in a kaleidoscopic video-ballet. It’ll be paired with Sibelius’s enigmatic Symphony No 6—a concise work the composer himself described as a musical shot of “pure cold water.”
Hallé Orchestra: The Soldier’s Tale. Live in Manchester and streaming online from 18th March.
When a young soldier meets an old man on the road home, he finds himself unwittingly making a deal with the Devil. Composed in the wake of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, Stravinsky’s ground-breaking piece of musical theatre uses only a small group of performers. Olivier Award-winning director Annabel Arden masterminds a new staging for Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Mark Elder.
St John’s Smith Square: A Century of Music by British Women Streaming online from 8th March to 8th April.
Celebrate International Women’s Day with a century of women in music. Violinist Madeleine Mitchell directs the London Chamber Ensemble in a programme of works by female composers from 1921 to 2021. Rebecca Clarke’s coolly elegant Piano Trio launches the sequence, which also includes chamber music by Grace Williams, Thea Musgrave, Ruth Gipps and Judith Weir among others, and closes with the world premiere of a specially composed work by Errollyn Wallen.
