Simone Young discusses the highlights of her second “theatrical” year as the SSO’s Chief Conductor, including several works she will conduct for the first time in her celebrated career.

Chief Conductor Jaime Martín discusses the season which includes 17 new works, including three by Composer in Residence Mary Finsterer, while soprano Siobhan Stagg is Artist in Residence.

When it comes to a toss-up between slow-release rumination and velocity, I’ll take the former any time. Khatia Buniatishvili’s last release – Pictures at an Exhibition,  La Valse and Three Movements from Petrouchka – was a brutal disaster to my ears, showing little regard or understanding for the music. She fares a great deal better here, although both these performances often lack what virtually all Rachmaninov’s music needs most: that uniquely Russian sense of yearning, with an overlay of stoic resignation. This is where the slow release rumination comes in! Both these concertos are played faster than usual. One of the great challenges for this music, especially the Second, is that of revealing a new insight beneath the ‘dazzling virtuosity’, which here, like that of virtually every other artist who records this repertoire now, is impressive. The recording also militates against the contribution of the Czech Philharmonic, which is recessively recorded and doesn’t provide the luxuriant backing that we hear from the Philadelphia orchestra in Daniil Trifonov’s recent triumphant CD. The Third Concerto likewise comes up slightly short with persistently low voltage until near the very end, when she lets the rhetoric rip. I found myself yearning for those langorous…

We’ve had “the next Callas”, “the next Sutherland”, “the next Wunderlich”, now, we’re hearing 28-year-old Georgian pianist, Khatia Buniatishvili touted as “the next Argerich”. Not on the strength of this CD, featuring works each of which exists in an orchestral guise (and in which I’d much rather hear all of them)! The Guardian critic unleashed as much bile on Buniatishvili’s Wigmore Hall performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition as his feminist colleagues routinely do on signet ring-wearing, old Etonian Tory politicians who ride to hounds. Broadly, I’m forced to agree: the very opening of this recording is promisingly imaginative, with the Promenade played tentatively – as if the viewer is intimidated by art galleries (though The Promenade connective tissue convincingly becomes bolder as the performance progresses). The Old Castle is hypnotically, but interminably slow. This works, but Bydlo, the ox cart, sounds as though it’s lost a wheel. Other movements – like Baba Yaga (the Hut on Fowl’s Legs) – are dispatched in such a helter-skelter way that they become virtually meaningless. What should be a magical transition between Baba Yaga and the gravity and grandeur of The Great Gate of Kiev is completely botched and goes for nothing….

Meet the young pianists, instrumentalists, singers and conductors taking classical music into the future.