Gianandrea Noseda: The 2025/26 Season

Principal Guest Conductor Gianandrea Noseda shares his personal reflections on the works he’ll be conducting this season, offering insight into his artistic vision and connection to the music. He explores new works from Russia and beyond in the 2025/26 season, following the conclusion of his epic Shostakovich and Prokofiev cycles with LSO Live. He will also conduct pianist Seong-Jin Cho and, for the first time, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

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Borodin is a part of the group of Russian composers known as The Five. It’s incredible because he was not a professional musician. As a profession, he was a scientist and researcher, and in his spare time he composed. Can you imagine the huge talent of this guy? He didn’t produce a lot of music because he was a weekend composer, but one of the pieces he could finish is, for me, incredibly completed and ready to be performed, which is Symphony No 2.

It’s full of Russian flavour in the style of Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and yet is very personal. You can hear the typical way of making melodies in the Russian style, there’s is a bit of folk music, and there’s rhythmical intensity in the second movement. It’s just a brilliant symphony. It’s not very long, but the content is very satisfying.

Stravinsky’s The Fairy’s Kiss is a masterpiece. The complete ballet is a masterpiece, but we usually perform divertimento without doing the complete ballet music, because the programme becomes too long. But I would say the Divertimento, which is a great piece of music, is the closest thing to Tchaikovsky that Stravinsky composed.

Chopin was a master in writing for the piano, so the orchestra’s duty is not just to accompany, but to reinforce, underline and embrace the piano writing. It’s not merely in setting back and just doing a professional job, even though the material is simple for the orchestra, but to really enrich the sound of the piano.

Seong-Jin Cho is a fantastic pianist for Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 2. Not only for this, but particularly for this being a winner of the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw.

I simply love Seong-Jin. We’ve played so many concerts, including three of the Beethoven piano concertos, both Chopin concertos, Prokofiev’s Second and Rachmaninoff’s Second and Third. He has a way of playing that combines modernity and knowledge of the historic way of performing. There is something that is connected with tradition and yet is moving forward. It is fascinating how he approaches Brahms, for instance. All the repertoire we perform together always brings an element of freshness, but is still very grounded. That is really something, it’s a quality that doesn’t have to be underestimated.

At the premiere of Serge Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No 1, the orchestra was under-rehearsed, and the conductor was completely drunk. You cannot expect a drunk conductor with an under-rehearsed orchestra to play a world premiere of any piece to be successful, but Rachmaninoff took the response very personally – he thought that he composed a bad symphony. He got rid of it and it was thought to be lost, until the orchestral parts were discovered in a library in Moscow and reconstructed in the 1960s.

I can imagine that a well-rehearsed orchestra with a well-prepared conductor would’ve absolutely given a great performance of the symphony, without causing this frustration to the young composer. It’s pure Rachmaninoff, full of melodic ideas and yet with a rhythm connected with the Russian dances. I am so happy to help the audience rejoice and rejoin with the Symphony No 1.

I’ve yet to make music with Patricia Kopatchinskaja, but when I was Artistic Director of the Stresa Festival, I was one of the first in Italy to invite her to perform a recital. I was mesmerised by her way of playing, but I’ve never conducted her. For Berg’s Violin Concerto, dedicated ‘to the memory of an angel’, the player needs to be an angel but also a little bit of a demon – when you talk about angels, there is also the other side of the coin. You need a kind of double personality to give a good rendition of the Violin Concerto, and I’m sure that Patricia will bring that to this piece. She’s an artist I’ve been keeping a close eye on for several years, and our first performance together will be here at the Barbican!