Composers: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Gustavo Díaz-Jerez and Igor Stravinsky
Conductor: Pierre Bleuse
Pianist: Gustavo Díaz-Jerez
Crackling, sparking and booming with untrammelled energy, this exhilarating midwinter programme – a vivid episode in the LPO’s Harmony with Nature season – celebrates the force and vigour of the natural world and heralds the onset of spring. Centrepiece is the UK premiere of Gustavo Díaz-Jerez’s Tajogaite – ‘cracked mountain’ – his piano concerto inspired by a volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands.
Alongside environmental evocation, there’s resurrection and renewal: petrified prisoners returned to life in Igor Stravinsky’s scintillating Firebird, and Christ restored in Rimsky-Korsakov’s mystical and exuberant Russian Easter Festival Overture.
A pre-concert talk between science broadcaster Kate Humble, rock star geologist Ian Stewart and composer-pianist Díaz-Jerez vividly contextualises this idiosyncratic programme. Clips of a grinning Stewart perched near spurting Stromboli and Humble hurtling towards the crimson beating heart of a Vanuatu volcano show why these deadly displays hold humans in such thrall. Stewart plays a recording of the crunch and grind of magma breaking through solid rock, and it sounds both orchestral and alive: a roaring dragon.
Humble welcomes Tenerife-born Díaz-Jerez to discuss his lifelong fascination with Tajogaite, and his efforts to transcribe its 80-day 2021 eruption using not only percussion – bass drum, tam tam, and suspended cymbal – but also the gamut of orchestral instruments in new ways: multiphonic woodwind sounds; noisy horns and trumpets. He explains his use of maths – “I love it! Beauty in equations matches that of poetry” – to mediate between natural phenomena and music, transposing sound waves via Fourier transforms, seeking out symmetry and patterns and treating the orchestra as a synthesiser.
The sounds of nature are usually his first compositional step; Tajogaite incorporates the computationally copied cries of seagulls and turtle doves, keening whales, howling gales and crashing waves.
A bracing run-up to the Tajogaite fireworks is provided by Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1888 Russian Easter Festival Overture, composed around melodies from the Orthodox ‘Obikhod’: 16th-century hymns and chants from an influential monastery near Moscow on which Russia’s church service was based.
Rimsky-Korsakov held these songs dear, particularly those around Easter. He wanted to create an overture encompassing the profundity of ancient prophesies, the miraculous Gospel story, the grandeur of the Easter Day cathedral services of his youth in Tikhvin (near St. Petersburg) and all the “unbridled pagan-religious merrymaking” of Russia’s ‘Bright Holiday’.
In a show focusing on upheaval, it seems appropriate that Pierre Bleuse, Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, gamely stands in for Maxim Emelyanychev as conductor, in his first appearance leading the LPO.
Beaming at the prospect, he steers this opening piece – daunting, with so many solos, and every section deployed so fully – from solemnity to ethereality, then merriment with flawless precision.
All the cadenzas are suitably shown off: portentous trombones evoking priestly pleading (“Let God arise”), trilling flutes summoning up angelic voices, and rapid harp glissandi adding celestial highlights. The percussionists are hard at work, too, from triangles and clashing cymbals to military beating timpani. It’s a joyous outburst, right up to the fanfares in the triumphant coda. Easter is embedded with ancient notions of renewal, the mutability of matter and the astonishing ubiquity and persistence of life.
All elements are expressed in Tajogaite, a complex depiction of roiling volcanic activity co-existing with resilient natural environments. It begins with a gentle, almost imperceptible rumble of drums and cymbals, then proceeds to punchier chords. Díaz-Jerez’s grand piano is rolled centre stage, and the maestro takes full control of it, inside and out, thunderously pummelling the keys, furiously fast, hitting the inner strings with his palms and donning black gloves to roll along the keyboard.
There’s a rush of lava as the whole orchestra slides down the scale. Harsh gull cries are perfectly portrayed by violins played on the bridge; harps swoop while cello glissandi circle. There’s surging, booming, puffing and gusting. Some might expect filmic backdrops, but they simply aren’t necessary.
Finally, the show alights on the scintillating ballet that made Rimsky-Korsakov’s protégé Igor Stravinsky famous at 28: The Firebird, a folkloric tale of frosty arrogance collaboratively melted. Obsessed with stasis – he’s determined to live forever – cadaverous Kashchei has deep frozen his realm and turned his detractors into stone. With the help of the incandescent Firebird, heroic Prince Ivan Tsarevich vanquishes Kashchei and his whirling minions. They free the ‘statues’, and Ivan wins the affections of a dancing princess, bringing life, hope and warmth back to the grim domain.
Commissioned by impresario Sergei Diaghilev in 1909, The Firebird had to be scored in a hurry for the Ballets Russes’ 1910 season. Stravinsky drew on Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1902 opera Kashchei the Immortal, deploying similar rustic tunes but adding innovative new highlights. The work was revolutionary, distinguished by its vast, colourful orchestration and techniques that match specific narrative elements to instrumental and melodic effects.
All are impeccably enacted by the LPO: the high register of the introductory bassoon, setting a haunting tone, harmonic string glissandi representing the Firebird’s shimmering feathers, ‘near the bridge’ playing for eerie shudders, flutter tonguing in the flutes to produce quivering, bird-like notes, Prince Ivan’s noble, earnest French horn, Kashchei’s complex, sinister chromatic sequences, and unnerving syncopation and choppy signature changes.
Thoughtful thematic juxtaposition and virtuosic performances make this a brilliant blend of evocative and mimetic musical ingenuity.
Reviewed on 17 January 2026
