Details

Barbican Hall
Silk Street
Barbican, City of London
London
EC2Y 8DS
England

Thursday 6th January 2022
7:00 PM

Programme

Unsuk Chin – Violin Concerto no.2 'Scherben der Stille' (world premiere)
Béla Bartók – The Miraculous Mandarin
Jean Sibelius – Symphony no.7 in C major, Op.105

Performers

Leonidas Kavakos – violin
Sir Simon Rattle – Conductor

London Symphony Orchestra

Other concerts in this Season ▼

Programme Note

The 2020s meet the 1920s, as Sir Simon Rattle conducts Sibelius, Bartók, and the world premiere of Unsuk Chin’s new Violin Concerto. 

A new year, and a brand-new masterpiece from Unsuk Chin, the poetic, dazzlingly original musical mind behind the opera Alice in Wonderland. She’s called it Shards of Silence, and it prepares the way for a musical journey back to the 1920s – when Sibelius and Bartók found equally astonishing, equally uncompromising new ways of listening to the world. 

This is Chin’s second violin concerto. Her first is already a modern classic, and she hadn’t planned to write another – but when she heard the playing of Leonidas Kavakos, she broke her own rule. Naturally, he’s the soloist for tonight’s world-premiere performance, and since history demands context (even while you’re making it) Sir Simon Rattle completes the programme with Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony and Bartók’s brutal, brilliant Miraculous Mandarin Suite.