03
September
Fantastic Symphony
Wednesday 23 September 2020 | 7.30pm Royal Festival Hall Tickets £46–£14 Premium seats £65 (transaction fees may apply) Book 020 7840 4242/lpo.org.uk Series discounts Page 43
Tchaikovsky Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet Lutosławski Les Espaces du sommeil Berlioz Symphonie fantastique Edward Gardner conductor Gerald Finley bass-baritone
‘Frustrated in love, a young musician of deep sensitivity and ardent imagination takes opium …’ With those words, Hector Berlioz set the scene for his Symphonie fantastique – a story of gothic horror and glittering excess, rolled into one roof-raising musical phantasmagoria and scored for the biggest orchestra the world had then seen. It’s a gripping way for the LPO’s Principal Conductor Designate Edward Gardner to raise the curtain on our new season; first, though, Tchaikovsky’s hugely popular overture sets the emotional bar high, and the great Gerald Finley enters the luminous world of Lutosławski’s Les Espaces du sommeil – music that inhabits the realm between dream and imagination.
Edward Gardner
‘If this is what Gardner and the LPO can achieve together we have much to look forward to.’
© Benjamin Ealovega
The Guardian, October 2019