Lutosławski: Les Espaces du sommeil

Programme also includes Tchaikovsky: Fantasy Overture and Romeo and Juliet and Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

Performing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra; Edward Gardner, conductor

‘Frustrated in love, a young musician of deep sensitivity and ardent imagination takes opium…’ With those words, Hector Berlioz set the scene for his Symphonie fantastique – a story of gothic horror and glittering excess, rolled into one roof-raising musical phantasmagoria and scored for the biggest orchestra the world had then seen. It’s a gripping way for the LPO’s Principal Conductor Designate Edward Gardner to raise the curtain on our new season; first, though, Tchaikovsky’s hugely popular overture sets the emotional bar high, and the great Gerald Finley enters the luminous world of Lutosławski’s Les Espaces du sommeil – music that inhabits the realm between dream and imagination.