On January 4 and January 5, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) heats-up wintertime with dramatic works by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benjamin Britten, and Edward Elgar. Guest conductor Karina Canellakis leads the CSO in performing three pieces, including Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with guest pianist Kirill Gerstein.
CSO Music Director Louis Langrée describes Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 as “one of the most challenging pieces for any pianist,” but reassures that the work is in good hands with the “wonderfully skilled, thoughtful, and imaginative Kirill Gerstein.”
Three guest conductors will lead the CSO in January, including Ms. Canellakis (January 4 and 5), Richard Egarr (January 11 and 12), and David Robertson (January 26 and 27). In addition to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto—familiar to many from the 1996 film
Shine—Ms. Canellakis will also conduct Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” from the opera Peter Grimes and Elgar’s “In the South,” which Mr. Langrée describes as a “brilliant tone poem” and “a musical expression of the sometimes idyllic, sometimes relentlessly tumultuous landscape of the Mediterranean coast.”
While all three pieces will take concertgoers on different imaginative journeys, each will also evoke the drama of their individual settings, made more exciting by Ms. Canellakis’s energetic conducting and Mr. Gerstein’s virtuosic playing.
