Saturday 17 October 2026
7.00 pm
St Thomas's Church
St Thomas Road
Brentwood CM14 4DF
| Conductor | Bradley Winand |
| Soloist | Tadasuke Iijima |
| Rossini | Overture to the Barber of Seville |
| Paganini | Violin Concerto No 1. |
| Sibelius | Symphony No 2 |
| Please note the change of programme |
Tickets will be £15 (under 18 £1). There will be a limited number of early bird tickets at £12.
For Tickets, click here: Brentwood Philharmonic Orchestra
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) - Overture to the Barber of Seville (1816)
Rossini was the most successful opera composer of his day, writing 39 operas before retiring as a very wealthy celebrity at the age of 37. Many of those operas have since disappeared from the stage but the Barber of Seville has remained a favourite. Its overture is often, as tonight, performed as a separate concert piece. The dramatic and operatic overture has no musical connection to the music of the opera as, in Rossini’s haste to compose the entire opera in three weeks, it was recycled from the overtures to two of his earlier long-since forgotten operas.
Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) - Violin Concerto No 1 (written in the 1810s, premiered 1819)
If Rossini was the most celebrated opera composer, the virtuoso violinist Paganini was far and away the most celebrated violinist of his day, becoming one of the first travelling virtuosos, dazzling audiences with his extraordinary technique and showmanship. He had the status of a modern rock star and was able to charge fees no other artist could command. He and the younger Rossini were close friends and Rossini influenced Paganini’s operatic compositional style which provides the backdrop for technical wizardry that took violin technique to previously unimagined levels.
Talking about this concerto, the modern virtuoso Joshua Bell said “Despite its obvious technical difficulty, this concerto is rich with musical challenges – it is extraordinarily operatic, straight out of The Barber of Seville, full of wit, charm, and drama. As the soloist, you get to play every character! This is not just a ‘showpiece,’ it is a masterpiece in its own way.”
After an extended introduction the soloist enters dramatically and maintains an alternation of energetic technical fireworks and great lyricism. The concerto is in three movements.
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) - Symphony No 2 (1901)
First performed in Helsinki in 1902, Sibelius’ second symphony was acclaimed by public and critics alike, as much for setting a bold new direction in Finnish music as for its perceived political content (Finland was then part of the Russian empire). Nationalists hailed it as a protest against Russian oppression (the slow second movement) and a call for frenetic preparation (the fast third movement) for the day of liberation (the triumphant finale).
Sibelius himself never acknowledged the political dimension and variously said it had no programme and later that it was a confession of his soul. The Sibelius’s baby daughter had died in 1900 and in early 1901, at the urging of close friends, the 36 year old composer and his wife went to Italy for about 6 months. There he moved out of the shadow of Tchaikovsky, discovered Italian music and Dante and enjoyed the longer sunnier Italian days. He sketched out a piece about Don Juan which later became the second movement of the symphony (so no suffering Finns there) and started on the rest of the symphony. He spent the summer back in Finland on one of its many islands completing it, only to rewrite parts of it at the last minute, thus delaying the premiere.
The work is noticeable for its bright sunny passages, frenetic third movement (at least for the strings) and triumphant finale, combined with dramatic sudden pauses and moments of rugged bleakness. The distinctive effect is painted with bold slabs of sound, often using unmixed groups of wind, strings or brass, alternating with moments of eerily sparse instrumentation.
The manuscript score was nearly lost. Sibelius gave it to Felix Weingartner, the conductor, for him to pass on to the publishers for it to be printed. Whether Weingartner sat on it or had actually posted it to the publishers will never be known but there were some anxious weeks (made worse because Sibelius did not have his address) before thankfully it turned up. The work has ever since been one of Sibelius’ most popular works.
