The Orchestra standing on stage at the Royal Festival Hall to receive applause, with Vasily Petrenko on the podium and raising his arms
© Frances Marshall

On Sunday 26 January we opened our flagship 2025 season with Music Director Vasily Petrenko, Lights in the Dark, to a packed Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre. Featuring Stravisnky's The Rite of Spring, Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.5, the theme of the evening was music that pushed at the boundries of established conventions, hailing new and rapidly-changing eras in both music and society. Lights in the Dark at Southbank Centre and the Royal Albert Hall highlights music composed during dark times, be it turbulent historical events or personal struggles suffered by composers. 

We were grateful to Boris Giltburg for stepping in to replace Paul Lewis and perform Beethoven with very short notice.

Read on to view more photos and reactions from the day.

All photos © Frances Marshall


The concert opened with Vasily introducing the series and the afternoon's programme, providing context to the composition of each piece - the development of ballet as an art form under Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the Napoleonic wars that deafened Beethoven's already-failing ears, and the powder keg of a politically volatile and industrialised society that preceded the First World War.

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"Three Pieces for Orchestra got a persuasive performance, their mechanical rhythms precisely played, their elusive melodic lines lovingly shaped." ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Guardian

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Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra opened the performance. Having suffered audience jeers and savage reviews for the premiere of his previous Altenberg Lieder in Vienna in 1913, Berg had a crisis of confidence and radically altered his style of composition. The result was the Three Pieces for Orchestra, a piece split into a Präludium, Reigen and Marsch which demanded enormous symphonic forces, including a percussive hammer reminiscent of the one deployed in Mahler's Symphony No.6. Dedicated to his mentor Arnold Schonberg and written in the same style of his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Berg sought redemption and a new path for his music. Berg's gifts for drama and textual complexity would continue to shine through in his next work, the opera Wozzeck.

"Details glinted with almost hallucinatory vividness; the clarity of sound was maintained through the highly complex concluding Marsch, all the way to its cataclysmic end." Seen & Heard International

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Living in a bombarded Vienna in 1809, Beethoven would write to his publisher "We have suffered a great deal... I have produced hardly any unified work, just a fragment here and there. The whole course of events has profoundly affected me, nor can I have the enjoyment of country life, so indispensable to me... What a dreadful, messy life around me, nothing but drums, cannon, men, all kinds of misery." It was in these circumstances he wrote his Fifth Piano Concerto, a concerto that innovated the form by opening with a single heroic chord from the orchestra, answered by a cadenza-like passage from the soloist. The epithet 'Emperor' was not an attribution by Beethoven - the composer himself had much disapproved of Napoleon's ascent to total power.

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"There was no hint of Romantic excess in Giltburg’s crystal-clear fingerwork. His relationship with the orchestra was a source of continual delight, and in the slow movement the woodwinds were as delicious as they always are in a Mozart concerto.Seen & Heard International

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"His every solo passage brought that same feeling of creating as much as recreating the score, often at a slightly slower speed than the preceding orchestral part, but never enough to impede momentum." ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Bachtrack 

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In 1913 another premiere caused an uproar, this time in Paris. Following the success of Petrushka and The Firebird, Diaghilev and Stravinsky's third ballet produced together would be choreographed by Michel Fokine. From the beginning of its premiere, The Rite of Spring prompted shouting matches between its detractors and the more radical-leaning supporters of this bold new work and its dance style, disconcerting rhythms and harmonic dissonances, a rebuttal of the Debussian dreamlike impressionism popular in France at the time. Stravinsky had a startlingly clear vision: a pagan girl dancing herself to death, an offering to the old gods of the earth. This drive to reach back into human history perhaps explains the proliferation of traditional folk tunes within the piece. In the end, Stravinsky's conjuration of primal forces would leave music itself changed forever.

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"There was something striking in the care taken to enunciate each wind solo – not just the eloquent opening bassoon but the burbling bass clarinet, the velvety alto flute and more. The music didn’t quite threaten to spiral out of control, yet it was an exhilarating performance – a showcase for an orchestra on top form." The Guardian

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"Perhaps most impressive of all was the opening bassoon solo, which seemed to emerge mysteriously, as if shrouded in mist. It earned Richard Ion a huge roar when he was brought to his feet at the end." Seen & Heard International

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Facebook and Instagram comments

"That was the most sublimely beautiful performance of Beethoven 5."

"We had a wonderful afternoon thank you it was such dramatic playing by all!"

"Thanks for a great afternoon, and especially to Mr Giltburg substituting at such short notice, and treating us to the beautiful Schumann encore."

"Excellent concert. I have seven recordings of the Berg and have seen it live about six times, but with Petrenko, I heard details and textures I'd never noticed before. The Stravinsky was wonderful, with one of the best renditions of the Sacrificial Dance I've ever heard."

"The weather and tfl were horrible... totally forgotten at the concert! What a treat. Bravi tutti."


Thank you to everyone who joined us for the first concert of Lights in the Dark. Join us next time on Sunday 23 March at the Royal Festival Hall for Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, featuring Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with soloist Bruce Liu.


Is your orchestral appetite whetted? Discover more music connected to the programmes for Lights in the Dark in our specially-curated playlists.

Discover More Music


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