Loading

Musical Landscapes and the Romance of Rachmaninov learn more about the music

Glorious Technicolor melodies, atmospheric textures and shimmering romantic themes are all promised in these concerts conducted by Domingo Hindoyan.

And there’s also a chance for Liverpool Philharmonic Hall audiences to hear a newly commissioned work premiered at last autumn’s BBC Proms.

You can learn more about what to expect in our programme notes which this year are being presented in a new and accessible way.

And in addition, this companion page draws together a range of complementary content which we hope will help shine additional light on the pieces, the people who composed them and the performers bringing them to life here in Hope Street.

Domingo Hindoyan

Chief Conductor Domingo Hindoyan leads this latest pair of concerts in his first season at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall.

Hindoyan was born in Caracas in 1980 to a violinist father and a lawyer mother and started his musical career as a violinist in the ground-breaking Venezuelan musical education programme El Sistema.

He studied conducting at Haute Ecole de Musique in Geneva, where he gained his masters, and in 2012 was invited to join the Allianz International Conductor’s Academy, through which he worked with the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonic Orchestra and with conductors like Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Andrew Davis.

He was appointed first assistant conductor to Daniel Barenboim at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin in 2013, and in 2019 he took up a position as principal guest conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

In the same year, he made his debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and was appointed as successor to Vasily Petrenko in 2020, taking up his position last September.

Watch Domingo Hindoyan conduct excerpts of a concert with the Orchestra.

Grace-Evangeline Mason

One of the stars of a new generation of British composers, the award-winning Grace-Evangeline Mason began composing at 14 and five years later, in 2013, she won the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composers competition with her piece Convergence for soprano, violin and cello.

Mason studied at Oxford, and through a scholarship at the Royal Northern College of Music where her tutors included Emily Howard and Gary Carpenter and in 2016 she won the Rosamond Prize.

While still an undergraduate she also won Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s Christopher Brooks Composition Prize as well as being asked to compose a new work to mark the 300th anniversary of Handel’s Water Music.

The Imagined Forest is a joint commission with the BBC Proms to mark the 150th anniversary of the Royal Albert Hall, and was premiered there by the Orchestra last September.

The composer describes the work as “a fantastical journey through a space that appears to be a familiar impression of nature, but simultaneously somewhere entirely unknown.”

Inspired by a Berlin-based collage artist, it creates its own musical collage using interwoven atmospheric textures and fragmentary melodic lines.

Read an interesting interview with Grace-Evangeline Mason here.

Gioachino Rossini

Gioachino Rossini was 32 when he sat down to compose Semiramide – one of 40 operas the Italian composed during one prolific 20-year period.

In fact, after 1829 when he produced William Tell, the Pesaro-born composer never again composed for the stage, despite living another 40 years.

Semiramide dates from 1823 and was the last work Rossini produced before he left Italy, first to work in London and then to take up a position in Paris where he received a pension from the French king.

It was commissioned by Venice’s La Fenice opera house and its melodramatic libretto, written by Gaetano Rossi, was based on Voltaire’s tragedy Semiramis about the historical/mythological female ruler of Assyria and Babylonia who killed her husband to seize power, fell in love -unwittingly - with her own son and was accidently killed by him.

While the theme of the opera itself is dark, its overture is surprisingly cheerful and sunny.

It features a beautiful horn quartet, and Rossini uses extravagant, almost symphonic orchestration to develop the themes which will be heard in the main opera.

Enjoy a recording of the Overture from Semiramide.

Paul Dukas

Thanks to Walt Disney, symphonic poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice remains Paul Dukas’ most famous and popular work.

But the French composer, teacher – his students included Messiaen, Duruflé and Albeniz - and music critic also produced a symphony, opera, a handful of piano works and an oriental ballet.

The latter, La Péri (a péri being a fairy), described by Dukas himself as a "poème dansé", was composed in 1911 and would turn out to be his last major work.

The one-act ballet, written for the Russian-French dancer Natalia Trouhavnova and premiered in Paris in April 1912, tells the story of Persian Prince Iskender who travels the Earth to find the lotus flower of immortality – guarded by the péri of the title.

Dukas reportedly added the striking opening brass fanfare to alert audiences that the ballet itself was about to begin. The main poème dansé, introduced by shimmering violins, horns and woodwind, is composed in both Romantic and impressionistic style.

Did you know? Dukas was very critical of his own work. He destroyed some pieces and allowed only a few of his other compositions to be performed and published during his life.

Listen to the fanfare from La Péri.

Sergei Rachmaninov

On March 28, 1897 Sergei Rachmaninov’s (()) First Symphony was premiered in St Petersburg – and was a humiliating disaster. The orchestra was under rehearsed, and it was suspected conductor Alexander Glazunov was drunk.

The 23-year-old was so devastated he stopped composing for nearly three years.

Instead, he made his living as a piano teacher and conductor while he overcame the trauma – latterly with the aid of hypnotherapy. It worked, and in 1901 he produced his sublime Second Piano Concerto.

His Symphony No 2 in E minor followed in 1908, with Rachmaninov conducting at its premiere which was, unlike its predecessor, met with acclaim and won him the coveted Glinka Prize.

It’s an epic sweeping symphony full of emotion, tenderness and gorgeous melodies.

The symphony opens in stately largo form, introducing the work’s recurring motif and reaching an intensely passionate climax before a solo cor anglais signals a change into the second allegro section of the movement, which is soulful and, at times, stormy, referencing the ‘dies irae’ from the Mass for the Dead along with a soaring melody and brass chorale.

The third movement, a romantic and lyrical adagio with a lengthy clarinet solo, contains some of the most achingly beautiful music Rachmaninov ever composed, while it is followed by an exuberant, optimistic and gloriously cinematic finale.

Did you know? Rachmaninov is a giant among the great composers – literally. He stood 6ft 6ins tall and had one of the greatest handspans in classical music, making his piano works – particularly the third concerto – challenging for other performers.

Watch former Royal Liverpool Philharmonic chief conductor Vasily Petrenko leading Oslo Philharmonic in a performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2.

Musical Landscapes is sponsored by Investec