Jonathan Lloyd, Brahms and Tippett

Barbican Hall, London
Barbican, Silk Street, London EC2
United Kingdom
020 7638 8891
http://www.barbican.org.uk/eticketing

BBCSO

James Gaffigan conductor
Stephen Hough piano

This, the second of our concerts featuring Stephen Hough performing Brahms, opens with another new piece by Jonathan Lloyd, this time for the BBC SO winds. Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is an epic, highly symphonic work, the longest written up to that time. Famous for the glorious cello melody that opens the slow movement as well as a corruscating and innovative Scherzo, this masterful concerto is hugely admired by Hough. Completing the cycle of Tippett symphonies we reach the first, a work conceived while Tippett was in prison as a conscientious objector and completed as war ended in 1945. Bursting with vitality and insistent rhythms, it has many of hallmarks of his later style, with a darkly Purcellian set of variations and a highly wrought double fugue to finish.

Jonathan Lloyd : new balls
Johannes Brahms : Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major
Michael Tippett : Symphony No.1