From the Depths: Lu Leads Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony

Tianyi Lu, conductor
Paul Lewis, piano
San Diego Symphony Orchestra

GARETH FARR: "The Invocation of the Sea" from From the Depths Sound the Great Sea Gongs
GRIEG: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36

Winner of the Sir Georg Solti International Conductors' Competition, conductor Tianyi Lu opens her concert with the self-standing first movement of Gareth Farr’s From the Depths Sound the Great Sea Gongs. Farr is one of New Zealand’s leading composers and a distinguished percussionist whose music pulsates with exultant rhythms and colors reflecting his love of the landscapes and surrounding oceans of his native islands, as well as his fascination with his country’s Maori musical and mythic traditions which go back hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans.

At the opposite end of the world, Norway’s greatest composer Edvard Grieg made his name when still a very young man with his brilliant and loveable Piano Concerto, still perhaps the composer’s most popular work and one of the most familiar piano concertos in world repertoire. The distinguished soloist will be the English pianist Paul Lewis. And the concert ends with one of the best loved of all Tchaikovsky’s works, his intensely dramatic Fourth Symphony, written at one of the most productive periods in the composer’s life, the time of his ballet Swan Lake and his opera Eugene Onegin. Operatic and balletic this symphony certainly is, with its fateful horn calls and its yearning melodies, and its infectious dance rhythms and sheer physical élan.