‘Orchestre Français des Jeunes, Poska & Tharaud’

We rarely catch Shostakovich in a blithely sweet mood, but his Second Piano Concerto is the exception to the rule. As a birthday present for his son – a pianist who was soon to graduate from the conservatory – Shostakovich wrote this uncharacteristically light-footed concerto in 1957. His compatriot Rimsky-Korsakov’s imagination had been captured seventy years earlier by the stories in the One Thousand and One Nights. In his symphonic suite Sheherazade, he conjures up an Orientalist fairytale world that perfectly encapsulates the fascination with ‘otherness’ as it manifested in 1888. The programme moves away from Russia with Recto, written by the French composer Yan Maresz in 2003. From 2025 onwards, Kristiina Poska will be conducting the Orchestre Français des Jeunes, consisting of the most talented French musicians under 25 years old. The pianist Alexandre Tharaud takes the role of Shostakovich’s son.