Leicester: Manfred Honeck and Vivi Vassileva

Programme

Vivi Vassileva brings her exuberant virtuosity to James MacMillan’s percussion concerto, the centrepiece of a programme that balances grief and joy, reflection and action, the spiritual and the physical.  

In Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, built around a fifteenth-century plainchant, MacMillan explores the Advent message of “liberation from fear, anguish and oppression” in music full of joyful physicality, even showmanship. It’s the perfect opportunity to experience the astonishing skill of percussionist Vivi Vassileva.  

Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten is one of the works that brought him the kind of acclaim that’s rarely accorded to living composers of ‘classical’ music. A single bell emerges from silence, then groups of string players play overlapping descending scales to create an effect of “endless slow-motion falling”, building in intensity until the silence returns. From these simple ingredients, Pärt builds music of haunting power.  

The slow movement funeral march of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (used to great effect in the film The King’s Speech) matches Pärt’s Cantus in its expressive intensity. It made such an impression at its premiere, a benefit concert for soldiers after some of the most deadly fighting of the Napoleonic Wars, that the audience clamoured for it to be repeated on the spot. But the other movements counter it with cheerful, dancing melodies, and the finale swirls to a triumphant close.