Maestro split: Rattle and Harding to share a concert

Maestro split: Rattle and Harding to share a concert

Orchestras

norman lebrecht

September 10, 2024

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra have inserted an unusual programme a month from now.

In the first half of the concert, outgoing music director Daniel Harding conducts works by two women composers, Lili Boulanger and Valborg Aulin.

In the second half, marked ‘bonus!’, Sir Simon Rattle conducts Sibelius’s fifth symphony.

Harding sounds excited: ‘For the best part of the last twenty years I have been telling Simon what a jewel of an orchestra we have at the Swedish Radio.

‘No orchestra has meant more to me than SRSO, and no conductor more than Simon. That, in my last season as Music Director, I get to enjoy a musical encounter between them will be a moment of pure joy.’

More here.

Comments

  • pjl says:

    Sadly his best recording of 5 (Philharmonia) was not quite matched in the cbso cycle and the Berlin one is awful. But the Swedes are usually fine Sibelians and, of course Sibelius, spoke Swedish as his first language.

  • OSF says:

    They couldn’t get Sir Simon for a full show?

  • John Holmes says:

    I think the last time they shared a concert was in Brum along with conductor John Carewe where they did Stockhausen Gruppen for 3 orchestras

  • George says:

    “Works by two women composers”

    Why not simply say works by Boulanger and Aulin?

    The answer: it DIE programming, that’s why.

    Sibelius’ magnificent 5th symphony on the other hand…

    • Verachtet mir die Meister nicht says:

      Well, the phrase about “two women composers” is here from NL, not from the orchestra, so has hardly anything to do with the programming or with DIE. Moreover, NL does well to put it this way, because, while most people will be able to recognise that Lili Boulanger was a woman, even if they never heard of her before, how many are so well aware of the less known Nordic composers or at least so well acquainted with Scandinavian names that they would know at once that a certain Valborg Aulin was a woman as well?

      Apart from that, Lili Boulanger has written some truly excellent music and would have definitely written much more of it, were she to live a similarly long life to Sibelius and not die so young…

      So well done, SRSO – there is something for everyone in this programme, and it even comes with a choice of conductors…

    • guest1847 says:

      Your media diet must have trained you very well to see any achievements by women as DEI, thereupon producing disgust as a reflex action

  • Pedro says:

    Please send both of them away and bring just one decent conductor.

  • Truth Hurts says:

    Harding was supposed to conduct Turandot at La Scala but was replaced by Michele Gamba, who drowned out the singers all night long as he followed the orchestra. It was not good. Was there an official reason Harding didn’t conduct? I was told he hadn’t learned the opera but I don’t give much credence to that.

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