Rachmaninoff: Inside Out: Jurowski conducts the LPO, Southbank

A London classical music highlight 2014: Jurowski, the Philharmonic Orchestra and virtuoso Alexander Ghindin take on Rachmaninoff. 

Packed with long and memorable Romantic melodies, and intense orchestral drama, the music of Russian composer Sergie Rachmaninoff was viewed as passé by the ferocious critics of the early twentieth century. Today however, it’s viewed as a pinnacle of late Russian Romanticism, celebrated by musicians and audiences throughout the world.   The Barbican , with the London Philharmonic Orchestra , promise an extensive showcase of the composer’s work in its series ‘ Rachmaninoff: Inside Out ’. The first concert of which explores the spirit of the Russia and thereby the roots of the LPO's principal conductor, Vladimir Jurowski .

Opening the show is one of the composer’s earliest works, Isle of the Dead, of 1908. Inspired by a Brocklin painting Rachmaninoff saw in Paris a year previous, the piece is in a ’symphonic poem’ style - a single movement of high-Romantic melody and dense orchestral textures evoking the foreboding spirit of the image which inspired it

Next is the First Piano Concerto - despite being lesser known of the composer’s three, it has a familiarity about it.  It combines all the elements we associate with the composer’s work - long spontaneous melodies, playful interaction between the orchestra and soloist, and the frightfully improbable virtuosity for which Rachmaninoff is known.  Under the fingers of Russian wunderkind pianist Alexander Ghindin, it’ll be an electrifying musical display.

The concert closes fittingly with Rachmaninoff’s final work, The Symphonic Dances, written in 1940, shortly before his death.  A Russian extravaganza, it pays homage to the styles of countrymen Prokofiev and Rimsky-Korsokov, as well as quoting directly a handful of Rachmaninoff’s own works.  Although you won’t hear Rachmaninoff’s best known works in this concert, it’s to be a cannily crafted overview of his style and relationship with Russia.