Randall Goosby plays Barber’s Violin Concerto

Randall Goosby plays Barber’s Violin Concerto; a soaring prelude to the London premiere of Caroline Shaw’s intergalactic oratorio, The Listeners.

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes… a space probe hurtles outwards from our solar system; its cargo, a golden record. That’s the starting point for Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners: a new oratorio in which Shaw’s intensely communicative music carries the words of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Carl Sagan into a future bounded only by our imagination, and our courage.

This is sure to be a high point of this Pulitzer prize-winning composer’s Barbican residency. But when it comes to our shared humanity, the music of the last century has endless stories to tell, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska has paired The Listeners with a song of defiance from Ukraine, before Randall Goosby soars free in the tenderness and rapture of Barber’s evergreen Violin Concerto.

Programme

Boris Lyatoshinsky Grazhyna
Samuel Barber Violin Concerto
Caroline Shaw The Listeners (London Premiere)

Performers

Dalia Stasevska conductor
Randall Goosby violin
Lotte Betts-Dean mezzo-soprano
Florian Störtz bass-baritone
BBC Symphony Orchestra
BBC Symphony Chorus