When Jess Gillam isn’t in the recording studio or serenading audiences with her acclaimed saxophone playing, she can be heard hosting her award-winning BBC radio program, This Classical Life. In Gillam’s bold, uplifting, and open-minded approach composer Anna Clyne found the perfect soloist to champion her new saxophone concerto, Glasslands, in which she lets loose the Irish folkloric spirit of the banshee through the virtuosity of the solo instrument.
In a program celebrating the fresh and new of the symphonic world, a fitting conclusion is Stravinsky’s riotous Rite of Spring, which with its rhythmic complexity, lush dissonance, and harsh sonorities retains its magnetic modernity over a century after a premiere which infamously shocked unsuspecting Parisian crowds. All this, as well as the drama of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, will exhilarate under the sure-handed and suave baton of conductor Kevin John Edusei.
