Richard Tognetti Artistic Director and Lead Violin
GREENWOOD Popcorn Superhet Receiver (Australian Premiere)
SCHUBERT Symphony No.8, Unfinished
BRAHMS Symphony No.1
Concert Program PDF
Richard Tognetti interview on Radio National about this concert
The ACO plays two of the great Romantic symphonies! That doesn't happen every day. In fact, the ACO has never played a Brahms symphony till now. We do, however, play a Beethoven symphony most years and Brahms’ first symphony is nicknamed Beethoven’s 10th. Poor Brahms, he took decades to finish it, such was the pressure to produce a symphony on a par with Beethoven’s. Most people think he did. Certainly he created a bold, sweeping symphony, perfect for the massed sound of ACO and ACO2 combined.
The ‘Unfinished’ may be Schubert’s most popular work, two movements of tension and turmoil, serenity and lyricism: the Romantic era well and truly underway.
Something else that doesn't happen every day is a rock star writing great orchestral music, but Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is the real deal. Described by the New York Times as classical music on “steroids, or acid, or both”, Popcorn Superhet Receiver won the Listeners’ Award at the BBC British Composer Awards. The work was featured in the Academy Award-winning film, There Will Be Blood, and was called “a movie music breakthrough” by the Boston Globe and “revolutionary” by Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. The New Yorker compared it to Bernard Herrmann’s Citizen Kane score for the significance of its contribution to the film.
