Walton and Rachmaninoff with the OCNE

On October 16, 17 and 18, David Afkham leads Orquesta Nacional de España in their own Sala Sinfónica, followed by two additional concerts on October 23 and 24 at Valencia’s Palau de la Música.

The program features Walton’s Violin Concerto with Frank Peter Zimmermann as the soloist. This piece asserts its own brand of modernity: inspired by Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, it incorporates a twelve-tone series into its first movement, which it nevertheless chooses to treat independently of the dictates of the Schoenbergian school.

The second piece of the evening is Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2. Whilst Walton’s career shifted from an iconoclastic stance in the 1920s towards the melancholic lyricism of his mature concertos, Rachmaninoff took the opposite path, incorporating an increasing harshness into his late works, a far cry from the opulent romanticism of his early years. Firmly rooted in his early period, his Symphony No. 2 (1908) remains a great bastion of nineteenth-century sensibility—expansive and elegiac—which, against all odds, has retained a relevance that supposedly more advanced works never achieved.