The Harrogate Symphony Orchestra returns to the Royal Hall on 12 November 2022 with what will undoubtedly be a spectacular evening of music, culminating in a masterpiece by Dimitri Shostakovich.
Following their successful season last year that included two World Premiers, a ‘Concert for all the Family’ and, in June, in many people’s eyes, one of the best concerts ever performed by an amateur orchestra, with the ‘Music around the World’, HSO players are simply ‘buzzing’ with excitement. The next programme, which will appeal to all musical tastes, includes Schubert’s popular Rosamunde Overture, a trumpeter’s dream concerto in the Tomasi trumpet concerto and perhaps one of the most dramatically atmospheric symphonies of all time, Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony.
Book tickets here HSO Winter 2022 Concert | Harrogate Theatre
Conductor Bryan Western is also looking forward to this challenging programme:
Our audiences always expect something a little different from the HSO and this next concert will certainly fit that bill. We have the fabulous Matilda Lloyd making a return visit to Harrogate with a work I am sure has never been performed in the Royal Hall: the wonderful trumpet concerto by Tomasi, a trumpeter’s ‘pièce de resistance’.
I also cannot recollect the majestic, powerfully inspiring yet beautifully tender 10th Symphony by Shostakovich ever visiting these parts. It is the most amazing work that has musically and emotionally gripped our amazing performers.
The background to the symphony is intriguing. Living in the Soviet Union under Stalin, Shostakovich often feared for his life, let alone his musical career. In 1948, after a series of run-ins with the state and criticism of his 8th and 9th symphonies, the composer found himself denounced and was told in no uncertain terms that his next large-scale work must reflect the ‘ideals ‘of the state.
Shostakovich, though, had other ideas and with the death of Stalin in 1953 Shostakovich felt slightly more liberated, he himself describing the work as a commentary on the dominating and constricting Stalinist regime. Whether this work might also have equal resonance for many living today in modern Russia, is open to conjecture, but it is certainly provocative stuff. A performance of this work by our local symphony orchestra is not to be missed.
Tickets are now on sale from the Harrogate Theatre Box Office tel. 01423 502116 and online and will be on sale on the door. Prices are £16, £15 and £14 with students half price 14s and under free when accompanied by an adult.
