Ives Central Park in the Dark, Ives The Unanswered Question, Szymanowski Violin Concerto No. 1, Adams Harmonielehre.
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Ryan Bancroft conductor, Bomsori Kim violin.
Imagine the days before motorcars, sitting on a bench in Central Park on a summers night… the sounds of night and the silence of darkness, the sound of street singers, night owls, piano ragtime, brass street bands and even a fire engine and this is the audio-painting Charles’ Ives creates in his Central Park in the Dark. It’s partner work from ‘Two Contemplations’, The Unanswered Question is less well-known but no less poignant. Often described as philosophy expressed in music, this relentlessly curious work deals with the “perennial question of existence”, and offsets three groups of instruments whose layers never quite come into sync.
Szymanowski’s intense and eclectic musical style rejects traditional tonality and romantic aesthetics; and ecstatic, sumptuous music and lustrous, cascading rhapsodic passages make way for the shimmering heights of the solo violin in his First Violin Concerto. With fast movements exploring exotic landscapes, the work is contoured by eastern scales and animated orchestral interjections, tinged with blues and mystery. South Korean violinist Bomsori Kim joins Principal Conductor Ryan Bancroft and BBC NOW for this scintillating concerto.
A gigantic super-tanker takes off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrusts itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket… this is the dream that inspired John Adams’ Harmonielehre. Full of surprises but always enchanting in its glowing and gleaming sonority, this expressive work bursts with energy, propelled forward by its Minimalist harmonic movement.
