LSO Strings at Bold Tendencies

The Concert

An evening of works for strings, in the LSO’s Bold Tendencies debut.

The LSO’s first programme for the concrete concert hall – devised by Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, LSO Leader – begins with the so-called ‘ninth symphony’ by pioneering Polish composer and violin virtuoso Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–1969). The Concerto for String Orchestra (1946) is amongst her most important works and won a Polish State Prize in 1950, going on to be performed worldwide.

The sensibility of traditional music is enfolded via Sally Beamish’s The Day Dawn (for string orchestra), based on an old Shetland fiddle tune of the same name. Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings follows; composed in the late summer of 1880, it layers beauty, joy and sweetness with solemnity, melancholy and devastation. The programme ends with Entr’acte by multi-award-winning composer Caroline Shaw. An alternately illusive, spiky, playful string instrument sound experience, she says of it: ‘I love the way some music suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.’