BBC NOW | Folk Tales & Fabled Love

Event Info

ENCHANTING | STRIKING | FOLKY

Start your musical journey this January with Janáček’s immensely popular tragicomedy The Cunning Little Vixen. With short and pithy symphonic pantomime sections, inventively orchestrated to give each character their own rhythmic motif, this folksy suite is laden with lush harmony and a mood firmly drenched in nature and love.

The immensely popular cellist Laura van der Heijden returns to BBC NOW with a performance of Martinů’s athletic and folky, yet expressively impassioned Cello Concerto, before conductor Antony Hermus turns puppet-master in Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Petrushka, the rebellious jester falls in love with a Ballerina who falls in love with the Moor in this fated folk story, with the dancing and despairingly flailing puppet cleverly wound into action by Stravinsky’s ingenious rhythm and orchestration.

Janáček – The Cunning Little Vixen Suite
Martinů – Cello Concerto No. 1
Stravinsky – Petrushka (1947 version)

Antony Hermus – conductor
Laura van der Heijden – cello