Karina Canellakis conducts Wagner and Scriabin

Richard Wagner championed the larger than life. In Tristan und Isolde, he aims his telescope at a young couple in love. Their passion is too great for this earthly world, resulting in extremely sensual music. The passion embodied by Sibelius’s only Violin Concerto is more restrained. It is not a typically virtuoso work, but rather a dream journey through a mysterious orchestral landscape. The refined and sensitive violinist Augustin Hadelich is our guide in this performance.

Karina Canellakis has saved the rapturous climax for the very end. Le poème de l’extase is one of the most extraordinary works composed by the already exceptional Aleksandr Scriabin, for whom music served as ‘a bridge to the beyond’. This work explores a spiritual world that others can only dream of – but Scriabin places the listener right at the very centre of it all, with the orchestra producing a kaleidoscope of dazzling colour.