Live in concert 2/5/14 BBC Phil/Mena 7:30pm

[mercia]

Juanjo Mena conducts the BBC Philharmonic in Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave overture and Mahler's First Symphony. Stephen Hough joins them as soloist in Schumann's Piano Concerto.

Live from the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester

Mendelssohn: Overture, The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave)
Schumann: Piano Concerto

8.10
Recordings by tonight's soloist, Stephen Hough

8.30
Mahler: Symphony No 1

Nature in all its gentleness and wildness colours this programme of romantic music, from the gentle first notes of Mahler's Symphony, with its blossoming of Spring and birdcalls, to a depiction of turbulent seas off the West coast of Scotland as experienced by the twenty year old Mendelssohn on a visit there. Schumann's great outpouring of his love for Clara is epitomised in his effervescent Piano Concerto

[bluestateprommer]

Caught this one on iPlayer just in time, even though the program is pretty standard meat and potatoes. It was OK, with the occasional brass scramble in the final movement of the Mahler and perhaps the odd overly stately pacing of the "Jewish wedding" moments (to paraphrase Leonard Bernstein badly) in the 3rd movement. Hough was fine in the Schumann concerto, and threw in an encore, which Christopher Cook charmingly admitted that he didn't recognize until Hough stopped by during intermission to tell him, namely SH's own arrangement of Dvorak's 'Songs My Mother Taught Me'. It was also nice of CC to mention at the end that Roy McGeoch of the BBC Phil's double bass section was retiring from the orchestra, something that outsiders wouldn't necessarily know (besides McGeoch's own immediate family and the musicians themselves, of course).