Full Works Concert - Monday 11 May 2015, 8pm

Jane Jones presents an exclusive concert from the LSO’s International Violin Festival, featuring Nicola Benedetti.

Tonight Jane Jones presents a very special concert recorded exclusively for Classic FM last week at London’s Barbican as part of the London Symphony Orchestra’s International Violin Festival. 

Read more about the LSO's International Violin Festival >

The violinist Nicola Benedetti’s stellar career took off after she won the 2004 Young Musician of the Year competition playing Szymanowski’s lyrical First Concerto. She reprises that tonight as the centrepiece of this popular programme.

Considered to be one of the first modern concertos in the violin repertoire. Szymanowski wrote this ecstatic, sumptuous work in 1916 while in Ukraine. It was inspired by a poem by the Polish poet Tadeusz Miciński:

All the birds pay tribute to me
for today I wed a goddess.
And now we stand by the lake in crimson blossom
in flowing tears of joy, with rapture and fear,
burning in amorous conflagration. 

Polish conductor Krzysztof Urbanski, winner of the 2007 Prague Spring Conducting Competition, makes his debut with the LSO in two key works of the Russian repertoire, Glinka’s whirlwind overture to Russlan and Ludmilla and Mussorgsky’s vivid evocations of visual scenes from Russian life and legend, Pictures at an Exhibition.

Glinka: Russlan and Ludmilla, Overture

Szymanowski: Violin Concerto No.1
Violin: Nicola Benedetti

Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
London Symphony Orchestra/Krzysztof Urbanski