On November 28, 29 and 30, David Afkham leads the Orquesta Nacional de España in an emotional program, featuring Mahler’s Blumine, and the Adagio from Symphony No. 10. His first symphony would have had five movements if its composer had not removed the second—Blumine, florid—after 1894. His last symphony, on {…}
On October 24, 25, and 26, David Afkham makes his San Francisco Symphony debut with Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, with soloist Sergey Khachatryan. The second half of the program showcases Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8, a piece composed in troubled times, and sure to resonate with today’s audiences. He then travels to Minnesota {…}
On October 3 and 5, David Afkham leads two concert performances of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck at the Sala Sinfónica in Madrid. Premiered in Berlin in 1925, more than a social drama or an anti-war statement, Wozzeck is a descent into the abyss of the human condition, captured in a score in which the echoes {…}
On August 22, David Afkham leads the Orquesta Nacional de España in San Sebastián’s Auditorio Kursaal in Maazel’s adaptation of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Der Ring ohne Worte. This eighty-minute work condenses some of the most memorable passages from the four operas that make up the great Wagnerian cycle. He then {…}
This July, David Afkham returns to the NHK Symphony Orchestra, serving as an esteemed guest conductor for a series of concerts across Japan. The program pairs Afkham and the symphony with pianist Martin Helmchen for Schumann’s Piano Concerto A Minor, Op. 54, the composer’s only piano concerto and one of {…}
Lili Boulanger, who died young, attracted attention with her precocious music. It is usually described as impressionistic, but the style of her last orchestral work, D’un soir triste, is closer to expressionism. It took Arnold Schönberg much longer to get used to composing for orchestra: the symphonic poem Pelléas et {…}