The Full Works Concert - Friday 8 November 2013

Six very different works from the RLPO - each with a different conductor.

The concert opens with Hamish MacCunn's The Land of the Mountain and the Flood. As a boy of eight, MacCunn had been taken to his first season of concerts at Crystal Palace in London. So it was apt that, as a prodigious 19-year-old, he should have gone back there to hear the premiere performance of his major new work. Although the music critic George Bernard Shaw was withering in his review – attacking the perceived formulaic nature of its middle section – The Land of the Mountain and the Flood has stood the test of time, remaining by far the composer’s most popular work.

Ludovico Einaudi joins the RLPO for Divenire. After this album was released in 2006, Einaudi went on tour to various parts of the UK, playing both the music on Divenire and orchestral arrangements of his most famous works to promote the album. It was recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Robert Ziegler with the composer on piano.

Completed in 1791, the year of the composer's death, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto marked his farewell to instrumental music. It was also the first clarinet concerto to be written by a major composer – except that Mozart did not write it for the clarinet at all! It was intended for the basset clarinet, an instrument that has four semitones added to its lower range.

A beautiful short piece by Rachmaninov follows. Vocalise is played by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under its current Chief Conductor Vasily Petrenko. 

Michael Nyman's The Piano Concerto is the composer's own setting of themes from the film The Piano, turned into a concerto and performed by Kathryn Stott with the composer conducting the RLPO.

Tonight's concert ends with Edward Elgar's In the South (Alassio). The concert overture was composed by Elgar during a family holiday in Italy in the winter of 1903 to 1904. The subtitle "Alassio" is a town on the Italian Riviera where he and his family stayed. He strolled around during the visit, while buildings, landscape and history of the town provided him the sources of inspiration.

Hamish MacCunn: The Land of the Mountain and the Flood
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Grant Llewelyn

Ludovico Einaudi: Divenire
Piano: Ludovico Einaudi
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Robert Ziegler

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Clarinet Concerto in A major
Clarinet: Nicholas Cox
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Roy Goodman

Sergei Rachmaninov: Vocalise
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko

Michael Nyman: The Piano Concerto
Piano: Kathryn Stott
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Michael Nyman

Edward Elgar: In the South (Alassio)
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Douglas Bostock