RECENT former BBC Young Musician of the Year, Nicola Benedetti, has been booked by John Gibbons to make her solo debut with his Worthing Symphony Orchestra.
She will play the Beethoven Concerto on March 8 at the Assembly Hall, when the programe will also comprise Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony, to mark the double centenary of his birth, and British composer Edmond Rubbra's A Tribute.
Benedetti, Scott
ish, 20, trained at the Menuhin School and won the BBC title in 2004, performing Karol Szymanowski's First Violin Concerto. She is in a £1m six-album recordings contract with Deutsche Grammophon and Universal Music Group Classics and Jazz.
Gibbons enthused: "There is undoubtedly an extra excitement in the air when I talk to people about the chance to see and hear Nicola Benedetti in our Assembly Hall – she and I have worked together on various violin concertos and I know that her infectious personality and bountiful musicianship will make this concert an afternoon to live in the memory!"
That will make two young star violinists on the roster for the coming season because Boris Brovtsyn is 99 per cent certain to return for his seventh appearance in Worthing. But this time he will play at the Youth Prom on February 1 and it will be Vieuxtemps' Concerto No 4.
On this Gibbons commented: "Following the impassioned applause of the Worthing audience after his performance of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole this spring, I am delighted to have been able to negotiate a slot for Boris in the new season.
"His commitments in Moscow ruled out one date but both Boris and I are delighted that he will be able to perform the virtuoso Fourth Violin Concerto by Vieuxtemps for the Worthing Youth Prom."
Click here for the Nicola Bendedetti website
The season will open on September 14 with a stimulating programme, without the brass or woodwind, but the big sound of strings in full. Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis will give Classic FM lovers the chance to hear it in the flesh, in the fine Assembly Hall acoustic.
There is Eclogue, by fellow British composer, the lyrical Gerald Finzi, then Shostakovich's scintillating First Piano Concerto featuring pianist Rustem Hayroudinoff and trumpeter Tim Hawes. Tchaikowsky rounds it off with his Serenade for Strings.
The New Year Viennese concert on January 4, as well as the popular waltzes, polkas and gallops of Johan Strauss and his ilk, will - as is becoming customary here - feature another of Mozart's Piano Concertos and they don't come any more popular than the A major K488, featuring the feel and echoes from the contemporaneous The Marriage of Figaro.
This No 24 one of the very few concertos of Mozart's with clarinets in the orchestra, so the sound will be rich and warm. German soloist Florian Uhlig returns to play this.
Pianist George-Emanuel Lazardis, who won the Worthing Piano Competition, will give Beethoven's Emperor on October 5, with Mozart's 39th Symphony, in Eb, and Rossini's overture The Italian Girl in Algiers.
The Remembrance concert on November 9 will feature Dvorak's Cello Concerto with David Cohen (who played the Elgar in the previous Remembrance programme) and Elgar's Enigma Variations.
The closing event is on April 6, with Ian Fountain returning to give Brahms' 1st Piano Concerto, after Smetana's overture The Bartered Bride and before Dvorak closes procedings with his 8th Symphony.
The Alassio Orchestra's light classics concerts come on December 7 and February 15.
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