On Tour in Tokyo

The evening

Shostakovich’s enigmatic musical reply to ‘just criticism’ sits alongside the fluid, lyrical melodies of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto.

Prokofiev wrote that his Second Violin Concerto was the product of his ‘nomadic concert-tour existence’, which took him from Paris to Baku, Madrid to Morocco. Despite this, its melodies carry more than a hint of the composer’s homeland of Russia, to which he was about to return, along with tinges of Spain in the finale’s clicking castanets.

Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5 was begun in 1937, a year after Stalin condemned the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth as ‘muddle instead of music’. On the surface, the Fifth falls back into Soviet line with its clear sense of structure and abundance of tunes. But there’s an underlying menace to the opening movement, a brooding darkness to the Largo, while the surging finale is surely nothing short of Shostakovich at his most bitingly ironic.

Fifteen-year-old ‘once in a generation’ violinist HIMARI joins the LSO and Sir Antonio Pappano for one of her first appearances with the Orchestra.