As part of the ‘World Orchestras’ series, this year during  the BBC Proms Festival, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by its music director, Lan Shui, makes its debut.

The orchestra and its conductor bring us, as a European premiere, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chinese composer Zhou Long's piano concerto Postures. The concerto, described as a fusion of Western forms and Eastern memories, has the German pianist Andreas Haefliger as a soloist; he is an artist of profound sensitivity, whose musical personality is opposed to mannerism and exhibitionism.

The concerto opens with Mikhail Glinka’s overture Ruslan and Lyudmila and ends with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27; in the latter, the composer overcame his early artistical doubts and produced an expansive work, with a vivacious scherzo on one end and a lovely slow motion on the other. Thus, the programme skilfully entwines three works that one could hardly have imagined together before.

Radio Romania Music connects you directly to the Royal Albert Hall in London on Tuesday, 2^nd September, 2014, starting at 21:30, so you will be able to appreciate the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s debut at the BBC Proms Festival, as well as the European premiere in its programme. Comments by Dan Ghineraru.

You will be able to listen to the concert again here.

Here is a preview of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s qualities, in a work by the very same Zhou Long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I8uP-ldAbA