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The brilliant young Nottingham cellist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, has cemented his reputation as the city’s musical hero by headlining the Nottingham Classics 2018-2019 season. The 19-year-old, who recently added a memorable performance at the Royal Wedding to several high profile engagements from Carnegie Hall to the Baftas, and whose debut album for Decca Classics reached the top 20 UK album chart, performs Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Concert Hall on 23 November.
Sheku joins an impressive list of artists that includes many of the greatest names in classical music. Neil Bennison, Music Programme Manager for the Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall, said: “It’s rare to get such a concentration of star performers in a season of this scale. I honestly can’t remember another time when virtually every concert offered a chance to see a world famous name”. Amongst those featuring in 2018-2019 are pianists Stephen Hough and Nikolai Lugansky; Violinists Viktoria Mullova, Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Nikolaj Znaider; legendary maestro Vladimir Ashkenazy; and classical chart-topping American tenor, Noah Stewart. Brilliant young British stars also feature alongside Sheku, with leading British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor providing the season finale with the Hallé on 5 June, and rising star saxophonist Jess Gillam – who contested the 2016 BBC Young Musician final with Sheku – performing with the BBC Philharmonic on 12 October.
Nottingham Classics has built its reputation as a leading UK concert series through mixing popular appeal with a sense of adventure, and continues in this vein in 2018-2019, balancing best-loved repertoire with less familiar pieces to explore. The new season, for example, offers Tchaikovsky fans plenty to enjoy with the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the First Piano Concerto, and the Serenade for Strings, whilst also giving rare outings to Saint-Saëns’ exotic Fifth Piano Concerto, Bartok’s tense modernist ballet score, The Miraculous Mandarin, and Vaughan Williams’ elegiac A Pastoral Symphony. John Adams’ highly charged reflection on the nuclear age, Doctor Atomic Symphony, features in a return visit from the National Youth Orchestra on 7 January, its third visit to Nottingham in as many years.
Adding to the roster of popular British orchestras in the season, two acclaimed international orchestras – the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra – provide distinctive accents in the Royal Concert Hall’s acclaimed acoustic. Two contrasting specialist London ensembles – the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta, open up the worlds of J S Bach (on 16 May) and American minimalist, Steve Reich, whose seminal masterpiece, Music for Eighteen Musicians, gets a rare performance on 15 February.
Nottingham Classics’ popular Sunday Morning Piano Series continues with a multinational line-up, with performers coming from as far afield as Latvia and Hong Kong, and the Royal Concert Hall will be adding a choral strand to its programme with visits by leading UK choirs, Ex Cathedra and The Sixteen. Finally, recognising that orchestras sometimes need to let their hair down and deliver some pure entertainment, the 2018-2019 season brings the next instalment of film music from resident orchestra, the Hallé, this time in a spectacular set of great scores from fantasy films and TV shows, including the Hunger Games and Game of Thrones.
