Friday 2 June 8pm … in Evenings With The Orchestra, programmer Robert Small concentrates on a brace of second symphonies composed in the decade or so after World War II. Michael Tippett’s Symphony no 2 encompasses, in the composer’s words, “joy; tenderness; gaiety; fantasy”, while Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony no 2, though subtitled The age of anxiety, “communicates a sense of overwhelming love”.
Sunday 4 June 3pm … in Sunday Special, programmer Catherine Peake celebrates compositions written 250 and 300 years ago. From 1773, we will hear Haydn’s Piano sonata no 38 and Mozart’s Trinitatis Mass, his only wholly choral mass setting. From half a century earlier, in 1723, she has chosen works by Handel, Marais, Leclair and Bach’s Cantata, BWV76: Die Himmel erzahlen die ehre Gottes (The heavens declare the glory of God), one of the first works he composed after moving to Leipzig.
Sunday 4 June 8:30pm … in New Horizons, programmer Paul Cooke features Donnacha Dennehy’s The hunger, a “docu-cantata” which fuses minimalism with traditional Irish seán nos singing and a soprano voice. It deals with the Irish famine of the 1840s and has been described as a “haunting, illuminating, harrowing yet subtly gripping work”. The program is completed by Brett Dean’s clarinet concerto, Ariel’s music, and Altar piece, by former Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud.