London Philharmonic

“Something invincible courses through Thomas Larcher’s Symphony No 2 … is it the sea, fear, or the will to live? This 2016 work, subtitled Kenotaph, is a searing commemoration of the thousands of refugees who had drowned in the Mediterranean. It’s a dazzling piece of writing that manages to evoke terror with its sounds of heavy sea swell and panic with its jangling tintinnabulations, but is also almost playful in its light-handed way with references and with timbre – a fleeting touch of Bach, a wheezy accordion, rasping percussion that seems periodically to leach the pitch from the rest of the orchestra. Its scope is Mahlerian, and it sounded like a masterpiece here, Mäkelä drawing a performance of huge assurance from the LPO.”

The Guardian, Erica Jeal, 30 April 2023


“Given all that enviably precocious success, no wonder Mäkelä has already attracted spiky reviews. He seemed to me to know precisely what he was doing, especially in the knotty demands of the Larcher … I am agog to hear more.”

The Observer, Fiona Maddocks, 6 May 2023


Programme:
Dmitri Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1
Thomas Larcher: Symphony No. 2 (Cenotaph)
Gustav Mahler: Adagio from Symphony No. 10
Soloist: Julian Rachlin