Open Rehearsal in Bedford: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Seong-Jin Cho

The evening

Star pianist Seong-Jin Cho joins forces with his regular collaborator and ‘musical soulmate’ Santtu, and the outstanding musicians of the Philharmonia Orchestra.

First comes Borodin’s atmospheric musical picture of a caravan of merchants and their camels crossing the steppe, with moments in the spotlight for some of the Philharmonia’s woodwind principals.

Then it’s time for Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, one of the peaks of the piano repertoire. From its majestic opening chords to the fiery fingerwork of its finale, with many a sweep-you-off-your-feet melody along the way, it gives Seong-Jin Cho the chance to show every aspect of his virtuosity. The critic at its Boston premiere who declared that it was “hardly destined to become a classic” could not have been more wrong.

Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony has been called “a film score without a film.” Setting the scene outside the Winter Palace on a freezing day in January 1905, he goes on to describe in music of great power and immediacy the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of peaceful protesters by the Tsar’s Cossack troops. Revolutionary songs and laments are threaded through the symphony. And the violence of the finale, with its tolling bells and relentless drums, sounds a warning to the future.