London Philharmonic Orchestra

Rachmaninoff: Inside Out
Lugansky performs Rachmaninoff’s Fourth Piano Concerto

JTI Friday Series

Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 4 (final version)
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 1 (Winter Daydreams)

Osmo Vänskä: conductor
Nikolai Lugansky: piano
London Philharmonic Orchestra

Torn from his homeland and eight years into a ten-year musical silence, Rachmaninoff was asked by a colleague why he no longer composed. ‘How can I compose without melody?’ he replied. But two years later, he picked up his pen once more and delivered the last of his four piano concertos – a work of magnetic impulse, fascinating psychological undertones and no shortage of those long, burgeoning melodies that make Rachmaninoff’s music so distinctive. His own final, revised version of the Concerto is performed here by Nikolai Lugansky, one of the finest Rachmaninoff pianists around, and is followed by the icy delicacy of Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony, Winter Daydreams.

In co-operation with the Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation.