Protest, Power, Revolution, Resistance

The evening

Protest, Power, Revolution, Resistance is a concert with something urgent to say. Conducted by Johanna Malangré, current Music Director of the Orchestre de Picardie in France, the programme showcases her electrifying musicality and imaginative leadership.

It begins with Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, a brilliant, bracing piece for brass and percussion inspired by Copland’s famous fanfare but reimagined as a celebration of women who lead, risk, and transform the world. From there, the orchestra moves into the powerful sound world of Margaret Bonds’ The Montgomery Variations, written in response to the civil rights movement and shaped by Bonds’ experience of Montgomery, Alabama. Both reflective and resolute, its movements capture the collective determination of protest and the sense of a new beginning.

After the interval, Haydn’s Farewell Symphony reminds us that messages in music are not always shouted, sometimes they are staged with quiet ingenuity. What begins as a tense, impassioned symphony becomes a theatrical plea for compassion, as players famously leave the stage one by one. Finally, Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony turns expectations upside down. Written in 1945, when a monumental victory symphony was demanded, Shostakovich produced instead a compact, spirited, and unpredictably shadowed work.