Jonathan Bloxham
British conductor Jonathan Bloxham was appointed Music Director of the Luzerner Theater in 2023, where he consistently achieves excellent artistic results in a wide range of repertoire. In the 2025/26 season he conducts new productions of Peter Grimes, L’elisir d’amore and Die Zauberflote. Bloxham made his Glyndebourne Festival debut in 2021, conducting Luisa Miller with the London Philharmonic and in the same year he conducted Glyndebourne Touring Opera’s production of Don Pasquale, having performed Rigoletto with the orchestra in 2019. This season will be Bloxham’s second year as Chief Conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, following in the footsteps of Andris Nelsons and Jonothan Heyward. In his first year he led them on two national tours and their subscription series in Herford, with two further tours planned for this season. In 2021 he recorded a CD of Strauss and Franck with the orchestra, described as ‘irresistible’ by Musicweb International. The 2025/26 season also marks Bloxham’s first as Principal Conductor of the London Mozart Players, building on his long-standing relationship with the ensemble, which he has served as Resident Conductor and Artistic Advisor since 2022. Bloxham’s conducting career began in 2016 when he became Assistant Conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Prior to conducting, he enjoyed a successful career as a cellist, performing across Europe and making his concerto debut at the Berlin Philharmonie in 2012. He studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Royal College of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and later trained in conducting with Sian Edwards, Michael Seal, Nicolas Pasquet, and Paavo Järvi. Since 2009, Bloxham has been Artistic Director of the annual Northern Chords Festival in Newcastle upon Tyne which he founded at the age of 20.
Martin James Bartlett
Award-winning British pianist Martin James Bartlett possesses a fearless technique and plays with a maturity and elegance far beyond his years. He was the inaugural recipient of the Prix Serdang in 2022, a Swiss prize curated by Rudolf Buchbinder in recognition of the achievements of a promising young pianist while forging an international solo career. Recent highlights include debuts at the Lucerne and Moritzburg summer festivals, a return to the Concertgebouw, and two chamber music recitals at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. in April 2025 he embarked on a two-week tour of the US which featured solo appearances in Cincinnati and San Francisco. Among recent concerto highlights are a UK tour with the Sinfonia of London under the baton of John Wilson, and a European tour with the LGT Young Soloists, performing Philip Glass’s Tirol piano concerto at the Berlin Konzerthaus, Vienna Musikverein and Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, culminating in a gala performance for the Prince and Princess of Liechtenstein in London. An exclusive recording artist with Warner Classics, Bartlett has released three widely acclaimed albums on the label; Love and Death (2019), Rhapsody (2022) and La Danse (2024). Bartlett’s early public success was as the winner, aged 17, of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2014. The following year he made his BBC Proms debut performing Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2016 he performed at the National Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral for Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday. In August 2020, he was announced as the winner of the Virtu(al)oso Global Piano Competition by Piano Cleveland. In 2018 he was awarded 2nd prize and the Audience Award at the Kissingen Piano Olympiad. In 2021 he was awarded the Queen Mother Rosebowl by HRH Prince Charles and graduated with a first-class Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree and an Artist’s Diploma from the Royal College of Music, having studied under Professor Vanessa Latarche. From 2020 to 2022, Bartlett was the RCM Benjamin Britten Piano Fellow and made his play-direct and conducting debut with the London Mozart Players at the Cheltenham and Ryedale festivals in 2022 leading works by Pärt, Mozart and Britten. In 2019, Bartlett was awarded first place at the 2019 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
When Tchaikovsky died suddenly in November 1893, supposedly from cholera, he was at the height of his musical powers. Nine days earlier his Symphony No.6 – the Pathétique – had been premiered at the Russian Musical Society in St Petersburg with its composer conducting. The Christmas before, The Nutcracker had been showcased at the city’s Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in a double bill with his opera Iolanta. And if he had lived, he had new cello and flute concertos in his sights. Still, despite being struck down so early – allegedly thanks to a glass of unboiled water – he left a huge legacy of innovative work, and memories of a tortured personal life that was a drama all of its own. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born at Votkinsk in 1840 where his father was the manager of a local ironworks. Young Pyotr was earmarked for the civil service, and studied at the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence before, aged 19, becoming a clerk in the Ministry of Justice. But his real love was music, and in 1862 he was among the first cohort of students to enrol in the city’s new Conservatory where he studied composition with Anton Rubinstein. After graduation, Tchaikovsky himself taught musical theory, albeit at the Moscow Conservatory. In his early years he produced works that have been described as ‘robustly’ Russian in spirit. He retained a particular fondness for his First Symphony, which dated from just after he graduated from the St Petersburg Conservatory. Throughout his career he was given long-distance support – both financial and emotional – from his patroness Nadezhda von Meck whom, famously, he never met in person. Even when her son married his niece Anna in 1884! Among a wide-ranging output, his most famous or best-loved works include his three ballets (Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker), his 1812 Overture, the opera Eugene Onegin, the Pathétique, his First Piano Concerto, Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture and his only Violin Concerto.
Sergei Rachmaninov
In 1932, the 59-year-old composer and piano virtuoso Sergei Rachmaninov was asked to define ‘music’. “Music is born only in the heart, and it appeals only to the heart. It is love!” was (part of) his reply. And the Russian composer’s music, with its luscious melodies and emotional resonance, has certainly appealed to the hearts of generations of listeners. While he remains renowned for his piano concertos, Rachmaninov also composed for orchestra, chamber ensemble and choir, as well as completing three operas, and works for voice. His earliest surviving piece for orchestra, his Scherzo in D, dates from 1887 when he was 14 and studying at the Moscow Conservatory. He produced three symphonies over the course of 40 years, although after the famously disastrous premiere of his Symphony No.1 in 1897, he could have been forgiven for never approaching the musical form again. Rachmaninov was so deeply scarred by the whole experience he fell into a depression and practically stopped all composing, reporting feeling pains in his hands and legs just thinking about it. He underwent therapy, and coming out the other side, in 1901 he produced his most beloved work, the Second Piano Concerto (dedicated to the hypnotherapist who had helped him), the response to which galvanised him back into action. Rachmaninov’s most productive composing years came while he was still living in his native Russia. But in the wake of the October 1917 revolution, he and his family left everything, including their beloved summer estate Ivanovka, and headed west from Petrograd by train and sledge, eventually reaching Stockholm. From there, they travelled to Copenhagen and then on to New York, where the Rachmaninovs settled on the Upper West Side. He lived the rest of his life in exile, and predominantly worked as a pianist, embarking on a series of concert tours in Europe and the US. His final work, Symphonic Dances, was composed on Long Island in 1940. Two years later, and in declining health, Rachmaninov moved to the West Coast and died in March 1943 at home in Beverly Hills, just a few days shy of his 70th birthday.
Georges Bizet
French Romantic composer Georges Bizet was born into a musical Parisien family – his hairdresser father was also singing teacher and his mother an accomplished pianist who gave the young Georges early lessons on the instrument. So impressed was the Paris Conservatoire with his talent that it offered the precocious pianist a place aged nine, where he blazed a trail, winning numerous prizes and came under the influence of Charles Gounod. A young Bizet also rubbed shoulders with Jacques Offenbach, and through him met Rossini. Aged 23, he also found himself at a dinner with Liszt and impressed the great man by playing one of his tricksy works by sight. While he composed in several different genres, including a youthful symphony written when he was 17, the fantaisie symphonique Souvenirs de Rome, songs, works for piano and overtures, it was his work on the opera stage which would make his name. His earliest stage works included the 1857 ‘operette’ Le docteur Miracle whose libretto was co-written by Ludovic Halévy, first cousin of Bizet’s future wife Geneviève. During the 1860s, Bizet produced The Pearl Fishers and The Fair Maid of Perth – the latter based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel of the same name. Halévy and Bizet teamed up again in 1872, this time on a new work for Paris’s Opéra-Comique, based on Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella about a charismatic gypsy called Carmen. It was also in 1872 that Bizet and Geneviève welcomed their only child, a son Jacques, who would go on to become a successful doctor and businessman in the burgeoning French car industry, and a friend of novelist Marcel Proust whom he first met at school. While everything seemed to be going well for Bizet, it was to be short-lived. In March 1875, Carmen received its premiere at the Opéra-Comique – and shocked the audience with its risqué themes and brutal ending, while outraged critics queued up to denounce it as immoral. You might think that bad enough, but worse was to come. Because exactly three months after that disastrous evening, Bizet collapsed and died of a heart attack. He was just 36.
Listen to Georges Bizet’s Carmen Suite.
Frederick Loewe
One half of one of the great songwriting partnerships of the 20th Century, composer Frederick Loewe has left a legacy of luscious melodies and singalong tunes. Born in Berlin in 1901 to Austrian parents, Loewe’s father Edmond was a well-known musical star who toured internationally while his young son, known as ‘Fritz’, was left at cadet school in the German city. Showing musical aptitude, Loewe studied at the conservatory in Berlin. At 13 he appeared as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic and aged 15 wrote the song Katrina, which was a huge hit, going on to sell more than a million copies of sheet music. And then in 1925, when his father took up an opportunity to perform in New York, he went with him. Loewe scraped by in a series of odd jobs for the best part of a decade, which included the Great Depression, before in 1934 he contributed music to a Broadway play called Petticoat Fever, later made into a film starring Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy. It was to be another decade before he had proper success on Broadway, however. In 1942 Loewe met lyricist Alan J Lerner and they started to collaborate. Their first big hit was the 1947 musical Brigadoon, which the partnership followed up with Paint Your Wagon, the 1956 smash hit My Fair Lady which starred Liverpool-born Rex Harrison on Broadway, in the West End and on film, the film of Gigi and the 1960 musical Camelot. It was around the time of Camelot that the two began to have creative and personal differences and stopped collaborating – they finally returned to working together in 1973 on the stage version of Gigi, followed finally by The Little Prince in 1974. Loewe won an Oscar for best song for Gigi, two Tony Awards (best musical for My Fair Lady and best score for Gigi) and three Golden Globes, while Gigi won nine Oscars in 1959 and the film of My Fair Lady won eight including best picture. Loewe died in Palm Springs on Valentine’s Day 1988 at the age of 86. Did you know? The choreographer of the original Broadway run of Brigadoon was Agnes DeMille, granddaughter of Liverpool-born screenwriter and theatre impresario Beatrice DeMille. Enjoy the My Fair Lady orchestral suite.
About the Music
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93): Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet
Composed: 1870, revised 1880 First Performed: March 16 1870, Moscow, cond. Nikolai Rubinstein; Final revised version: 10 September 1880, Tbilisi, Georgia, cond. Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov The idea of composing an orchestral piece that tells the basic story of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet didn’t come from Tchaikovsky himself. It was the composer Mily Balakirev who suggested it (Balakirev liked telling other composers what they should write), in the process providing Tchaikovsky with a complete musical ground plan: the kind of structure Tchaikovsky might use, how he might deploy the themes associated with the main characters, even which keys to use for which scenes and emotions. Surprisingly, Tchaikovsky didn’t find this limiting: instead, it inspired him to create one of the most gripping, stirring tone poems in all music. It is quite possible to enjoy Romeo and Juliet simply as a gripping symphonic drama – it doesn’t need any kind of programmatic crutch to prop it up. All the same it helps to have the outlines of the musical story. A hymn-like tune introduces Friar Lawrence, the young couple’s counsellor, while anxious strings convey his forebodings. The hair-trigger tension between the Montague and Capulet families emerges in the following Allegro, with rhythmic cymbal clashes depicting furious swordplay. Eventually the music calms down, and the famous love theme begins, magically conveying the lovers’ emotions and the beauty of the night, with an underlying hint of unease. Conflict returns, and eventually so does the love theme, but it now feels embattled, and the driven Allegro music sweeps back in, with unmistakably tragic consequences. A ghost of the love theme hovers above funereal drums, Friar Lawrence’s hymn-tune comments for the last time, then the love theme returns, radiantly transfigured. Love, it seems to say, is stronger than death.
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943): Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op 43
The theme Rachmaninov took for this dazzling, powerfully atmospheric set of variations comes from the 24 Caprices for solo violin by the stellar 19th century virtuoso Niccolò Paganini. During Paganini’s lifetime a legend grew up that he’d achieved his scintillating powers by selling his soul to the Devil – which of course did nothing to harm his ticket sales. This legend becomes a kind of background programme for Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody. Interwoven with Paganini’s theme – particularly towards the end of the Rhapsody – is an old Roman Catholic chant that obsessed Rachmaninov from early youth, the ‘Dies irae’, which tells of God’s wrath against sinners on the Day of Judgement. But there’s also a playful, mischievous element at work here, and the last-minute joke at the ending suggests that even there, Paganini may have had the last word. Broadly speaking, the Rhapsody falls into four linked sections. The orchestra presents the bare outline (the ‘skeleton’, one might aptly say), of Paganini’s theme, then the theme itself appears – the virtuoso himself takes the stage. This fast section, in two-time, full of coruscating brilliance, yields to a kind of minuet-scherzo section in three-time, elegant at first, but soon becoming more demonically active. The tempo drops, and a gorgeous long melody emerges, ingeniously derived from the shape of Paganini’s theme – Rachmaninov could match even Tchaikovsky when it came to creating great ‘Love’ themes. The tempo ramps up, and a helter-skelter finale begins. Near the end, as the Dies irae blares out on the brass, things seem to be getting very dark indeed, but the ending is a delicious surprise, like the deft, gentle snuffing out of a candle.
Georges Bizet (1838-75) Carmen Suite No.1
Composed: 1873-4 First Performed: 3 March 1875, Paris, Opéra-Comique, cond. Adolphe Deloffre 1. Prélude (Act I, Prelude – ‘Fate Motive’) 2. Aragonaise (Interlude before Act 4) 3. Intermezzo (Interlude before Act 3) 4. Séguedille (Act 1, Carmen: ‘Près des remparts de Séville’) 5. Les Dragons d'Alcala (Interlude before Act 2 6. Les Toréadors For most of his short career, Bizet had to struggle for recognition. Carmen, one of the most perfect achievements in the operatic repertoire, was the last thing he finished, and he only just lived to see its first few performances. But – with cruel irony – his sudden, premature death seems to have swung opinion round in his favour. The same critics who’d roundly denounced Carmen now hailed it as a masterpiece and the audiences roared their approval. How could they have missed it before? The characterisation – the leading roles and the crowd scenes – is wonderfully flavoursome, the Spanish-influenced (but never pastiche-y) melodic writing is of the kind that lodges itself forever in the memory, and the working out of the plot (coloured by the wonderfully sinister ‘Fate Motive’, heard in the first movement of this Suite) has a compelling urgency even Verdi might have admired. Tchaikovsky was simply blown away, as was Wagner’s former disciple, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The First Carmen Suite was put together after Bizet’s death by his friend Ernest Giraud. It’s closely faithful to Bizet’s orchestration, but it doesn’t follow the order of events in the opera. Giraud’s priority was to showcase the best tunes in the most effective musical context, and it works!
Frederick Loewe (1901-1988) - arr. Robert Russell Bennett: My Fair Lady: Symphonic Picture
Composed (original musical & arrangement): 1956 For many years, Robert Russell Bennett was the go-to arranger and orchestrator for Broadway musicals. His work for Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Frederick Loewe, composer of the My Fair Lady score, added extra touches of glitter and glamour to what were already wonderful musical compositions. Loewe created My Fair Lady with the lyricist Jay Lerner, based on the play Pygmalion (1913) by George Bernard Shaw. Shaw had taken the Ancient Greek legend of the sculptor who falls in love with his own creation and given it a clever modern spin. In the play, Professor Henry Higgins, a distinguished phonetics expert and classic cynical misogynist, takes it upon himself to ‘improve’ (socially and linguistically) a Cockney flower girl Eliza, and despite himself ends up falling in love with her – or, as he puts it, ‘grows accustomed’ to her. Lerner and Loewe added attitude to Shaw’s play, plus an impressive list of glorious tunes. Robert Russell Bennett took several of these and wove them together into a continuous ‘Symphonic Picture’ – rather like Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. Like the Bernstein, it tells the story of the musical concisely, while allowing us to savour the beauty and sheer catchiness of the melodies.