Age of Anxiety

The evening

‘If the charge of theatricality in a symphonic work is a valid one,’ Bernstein wrote of his idiosyncratic work for piano and orchestra, ‘I am willing to plead guilty.’

Following the scheme of Auden’s poem, four strangers find themselves at a bar, and spend an evening dissecting the human condition in colourful diversions. Hayato Sumino returns to the Philharmonic to perform this most unusual work for piano and orchestra – ever changing, a constant barrage of questions and thoughts.

Around the millennium, Jennifer Higdon found her world speeding up: ‘Everyone follows the beat of their own drummer,’ she wrote, ‘and those drummers are beating faster and faster on many different levels.’ Like a character from Bernstein’s symphony, Fanfare Ritmico is her rumbling, percussive musical monologue.

We conclude with Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Premiered in January 1945, it could have so easily been another musical expression of wartime suffering. Instead, his music is full of warmth, heaviness, and hope.

Hayato Sumino. Photo: Ryuya Amao