91Èȱ¬

All music tells a story, but the best music tells more than one. Shostakovich’s Festive Overture opens with jubilant trumpets – but this was the Soviet Union, so it would do, wouldn’t it? Prokofiev wrote his Sixth Symphony in the aftermath of World War Two, and though it’s certainly an epic, it’s far from clear that it ends in anything as simple as triumph. As you’d expect from Ilan Volkov, it’s the climax of a whole evening of music that asks as many questions as it answers, including Olga Neuwirth’s utterly original vision of a robot creator going terrifyingly off the rails. Armed with DJ turntables, a megaphone and clicking metal frogs, soloist Colin Currie - possibly the world’s greatest living percussionist – is the only man who can stop it…

This concert ends at approximately 9:30pm.