Composers: Leoš Janáček, Grażyna Bacewicz et al.
Conductor: Edward Gardner
A rousing drum-roll and a frenzy of strings opens the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO)’s first evening of Central European music in style. Grażyna Bacewicz, a Polish composer and violinist, often wrote for violins. But this 1943 Overture also features plenty of wind instruments and percussion (bass and snare drums, cymbals, glockenspie), compressing the power of a whole symphony into a rousing six minutes. There’s a brief and haunting flute and then the full orchestra is back and blazing. The evening’s programme of Bohemian Rhapsodies is technically demanding, but the LPO makes it look easy.
Next up is Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s Violin Concerto No. 2. The young Czech violinist Josef Špaček, playing with the LPO for the first time, is gently majestic. Martinů wrote the concerto in the US, also in 1943, and it’s full of an exile’s homesickness. In a clever piece of programming, where each piece of music speaks to the others, the concerto features harmonic progressions or Julietta chords, as Martinů’s music often does. Based on Moravian cadences, Janáček used these in Taras Bulba, the evening’s finale.
The concerto is an excellent showcase for Špaček’s talents. He recreates Martinů’s plangent longing while battling trombones, percussion and huge sections where the whole orchestra piles in. The stage is packed and more than 90 LPO musicians are involved in the evening’s programme. As an encore, Špaček launches into Dvořák’s Humoresque No. 7, an instantly-recognisable piece of music that sends the audience dancing into the interval.
Edward Gardner, a conductor for many years at the English National Opera and other world-class ensembles, channels his narrative flair. He first conducted the LPO more than two decades ago and has been its principal conductor since 2021, bringing a trademark fluidity and verve. Gardner is particularly magnificent during the startling Symphony No. 4 by Witold Lutosławski, a technically challenging piece of music.
The Polish composer’s last major work, first performed in 1993, could have been a slightly dry experimental piece, but in Gardner’s hands it’s astonishing. The harps ripple, the violins vibrate, the basses pulse. There are birdsong-like bursts of woodwind and scamperings of piano, a stormy thunder of drums or skeleton-dance from the xylophone and an irrepressible dynamism about the whole so that seemingly disparate elements build to a unified climax. Gardner knows just where the piece is going. Leaping, slicing, beckoning, marionette-dancing, he coaxes almost impossible sounds from the orchestra: the rousing cacophony of a dawn chorus or the low vibrating strings like bitterns calling over lonely marshes.
By contrast with this relative rarity, perhaps the evening’s best-known piece of music is Leoš Janáček’s Taras Bulba. Janáček’s rhapsody was inspired Nikolai Gogol’s Cossack novella of the same name. Written in the 1910s, the rhapsody’s movements dramatise three episodes from the novel. It starts with the love story and death of Andrei, Taras Bulba’s younger son, killed by his own father for treachery. This movement opens with various romantic solos, as Andrei falls in love with a Polish general’s daughter, and climaxes with trombones and trumpets in the heat of battle. The second movement represents the execution of Andrei’s older brother by the Poles, who celebrate with a violin-rich mazurka. And, finally, Taras Bulba also dies, prophesying a super-Tsar to the church-style accompaniment of organ-playing and bells.
Each piece of music, according to Gardner, is “seasoned with the unique rhythm and flavour of each individual language.” The conductor is a particular fan of Central European music and tonight’s programme is the first of two concerts in a mini-series called Phoenix Lands, which showcase this “special fascination.” In what are now Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, “composers wrote with a deep sense of pride in their nations, amid the jeopardy of political turmoil,” says Gardner: “I’m excited about sharing my passion for the music of these regions, and exploring with you their unique, intoxicating musical languages.”
Reviewed on 4 February 2026
