About the Concert

Tickets for these and other events will go on sale on 21 JUNE, as will election tickets for the coming season.

She is four when she starts composing. At 12, she writes her first opera. Our Composer in Residence Lera Auerbach began early to see her life and art as one. Yet music was and is only one part of her creative work. She is also known as a poet, visual artist and performer. Her Sixth Symphony also shows her commitment: this moving, large-scale symphonic work was inspired by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Vice Consul in Lithuania, who saved thousands of Jewish refugees during the Second World War, and is dedicated to him and all those who risked their lives to help Jewish people during the Holocaust.  Lera Auerbach was asked to write the work by the renowned Japanese-American-Israeli cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper.  Ms Cooper's husband's father, Irving Rosen, was the recipient of one of the thousands of visas Sugihara issued.
Commissioned by the International Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the American Society for Yad Vashem, the result is a sound world all its own that stirs and moves the listener on many levels.
Mendelssohn's "Scottish" Symphony seems to be the complete opposite, speaking musically of untouched nature, of the barren and beautiful landscape of Scotland, which deeply impressed the young Mendelssohn. But here, too, there is a double bottom, so to speak: for Mendelssohn was inspired during a visit to Mary Stuart's castle. The Scottish queen had to flee her country and was later executed - she was suspected of high treason...