Pekka Kuusisto: Four Seasons, and Four Seascapes

Programme

Finnish violinist and conductor Pekka Kuusisto presents his own distinctive take on Vivaldi’s masterpiece.

Pekka Kuusisto has a real gift for communicating through music. That could mean getting a concert audience of 6000 singing a Finnish folksong, or playing electric violin in a collaboration with a juggler, or making a film for Greenpeace in a devastated forest… Tonight he shines his distinctive light on one of the world’s best-loved musical depictions of nature, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, interspersing the familiar movements with improvisation.

Fresh sounds open the evening too, with Isobel Waller-Bridge’s new piece, commissioned specially for the Human / Nature series. Isobel Waller-Bridge is an award winning composer known for her scores for film, television and theatre, alongside her work in electronic music and contemporary classical music. Isobel’s television soundtrack work includes Fleabag, and for film, Emma (2020), Munich – The Edge of War (2022).

Britten’s Four Sea Interludes are taken from his opera Peter Grimes, a compelling portrait of a fishing community whose lives are intertwined with the sea and the weather. The orchestra vividly depicts the different faces of the sea, from dawn tranquility to a fearsome storm.