Lars Vogt returns for an evening of Big Gestures including Announcing Royal Northern Sinfonia’s 2015/16 Season...

Lars Vogt, Royal Northern Sinfonia’s incoming Music Director, returns to Sage Gateshead on Thursday 16 April for a concert of lush romanticism, as well as to announce the forthcoming season. The pianist-cum-conductor features in both capacities, as soloist for Schumann’s musical love letter, his Piano Concerto in A minor and Janacek’s Concertino. Vogt was announced Music Director designate in April 2014, in anticipation of the opening concert of the current season, where he kicked off the Beethoven symphony cycle to a packed out house.  This concert will be his second appearance in the season, and this time he has specially selected works by two leading Czech composers as well as the Schumann. Janacek’s Concertino is a septet for piano, strings and wind, with movements evoking the animal characteristics and fantastical, from Grumpy Hedgehog to scene from a fairy-tale, where everybody is arguing. Vogt describes the work as ‘very immediate and direct whilst still poetic, like a dive into the human psyche.’ Dvorak’s Eighth symphony has caught the imagination of audiences old and new since its premiere in 1890, as a work the Guardian’s Tom Service described as ‘art that conceals art’ with its harmonic and melodic complexity appearing seamless. It was his performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Simon Rattle conducting that won him second place in the Leeds International Piano Competition, and also led the recently appointed Principal Conductor Designate of the LSO to describe him as ‘one of the most extraordinary musicians of any age group that I have had the fortune to be associated with’. Always willing to embrace a challenge, Royal Northern Sinfonia will be led by Lars at the piano, performing this full orchestral work without a conductor. Not an easy feat, as Vogt explains... “Some of my conductor friends don’t really want to do the Schumann Piano Concerto as there are some really tricky things in there to organise...and we’re going to do it without a conductor, because we have a feeling that we can perform this in a chamber music way, looking at each other and feeling what we’re going to do! The work has been so important to me - it is THE Romantic piano concerto, and I am really looking forward to playing it with my orchestra here at Sage Gateshead” In addition to the concert, Lars alongside Director of Royal Northern Sinfonia and Classical Music Programme Thorben Dittes will announce the classical offering for the 2015/16 season which will launch in the autumn. The next season will see Lars Vogt return in the official capacity as Music Director, and will also feature prominently another new appointment, Julian Rachlin as Principal Guest Conductor. The season will go on sale to Friends of Royal Northern Sinfonia and Sage Supporters from Saturday 18 April, and will be available for general sale from Thursday 21 May.