91Èȱ¬

Tom McKinney continues a week of highlights from recent European Summer Festivals.

Today we're on the shores of Lake Geneva at the Septembre Festival, the longest running classical music festival in Switzerland. Last year the Russian National Orchestra played an all-Russian programme there pairing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto - the best thing to come from a very bad marriage - with Scriabin's Symphony No 1. Composed at the turn of the twentieth century it features six movements instead of the usual four, and features influences of Wagner, Liszt, Franck and Tchaikovsky. At rehearsals for the first full performance which took place in Moscow , the conductor Vasily Safonov introduced it to the players dramatically with the statement, ‘Gentlemen, here is the new Bible’.

At the Berlin Music Festival last year there was another Russian symphonic debut written seven decades after Scriabin's. Alfred Schnittke's iconoclastic work, written in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, has been described as 'The Gulag Archipelago of music' referencing Solzhenitsyn's famous text, and more recently 'a colossal temper tantrum'. It juxtaposes direct quotations from Handel and Beethoven alongside popular music of the time, and opens with a single player on stage and no conductor in sight. The conductor in today's performance, when he does finally appear, is Valery Gergiev.

Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D, op. 35
Alexandra Conunova, violin
Russian National Orchestra
Mikhail Pletnev, conductor

Scriabin: Symphony No. 1 in E, op. 26
Polina Shamaeva, mezzo-soprano
Yury Rostotsky, tenor
Glinka Chorus
Russian National Orchestra
Mikhail Pletnev, conductor

Schnittke: Symphony No. 1
Munich Philharmonic Orchestra
Valery Gergiev, conductor