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.
Jess Gillam
Superstar saxophonist Jess Gillam is renowned for her electrifying performances, vibrant stage presence and magnetic personality. Ulverston-raised Gillam first appeared with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in July 2017 when she performed in a Last Night of the Summer Pops concert, while her other collaborations with the Orchestra include Glazunov’s Saxophone Concerto. Gillam began playing saxophone at the age of seven and attended the Junior Royal Northern College of Music while still at school. She studied at the college with Rob Buckland and was mentored by John Harle. She burst on to the music scene in 2016 when, aged 18, she became the first saxophonist to reach the final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year. She was also the first saxophonist to be signed to Decca Classics, with her debut album RISE reaching the top of the UK Classical chart. Gillam made her Proms debut in 2017 – and 12 months later became the youngest ever soloist to perform at the Last Night of the Proms, following it with a Classic BRIT Award, and in 2021 she was made an MBE for services to music. In demand both on the concert stage and in the world’s leading recital halls, she is also passionate about broadening the repertoire for the saxophone, especially in the classical sphere. Recent commissions include Anna Clyne’s Glasslands which was premiered with the Detroit Symphony. Other new works include Dani Howard’s Saxophone Concerto, first heard with Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, and Karl Jenkins’s Stravaganza performed to a sold-out BBC Proms audience. Gillam held the position of Associate Artist of the Royal Albert Hall until 2025 and was an Artistic Partner of Manchester Camerata. Equally at home behind the microphone, her award-winning weekly show, This Classical Life, on BBC Radio 3 is now in its seventh season.
Antonin Dvořák
Born in 1841 in the small Bohemian village of Nelahozeve, where his zither-playing butcher father ran an inn, Antonin Dvořák showed an early aptitude for music. At the age of 12, the young Antonin – the eldest of 14 children – was sent 10 miles away to Zlonice where he lived with an aunt and uncle while he undertook musical studies (and learned the rudiments of the butchery trade). But in the end, it was melody that won the day for the teenage butcher’s apprentice when he enrolled at the Institute for Church Music in Prague. Dvořák’s earliest foray into the professional music world was as a viola player, and in 1866 he played in two premieres of Smetana operas – The Brandenburgers and The Bartered Bride – under the baton of the composer himself. Little did anyone around him know that at home he had a growing number of manuscripts of his own tucked away, including two symphonies and an opera. It wasn’t until 1873 that he had his first major success as a composer with The Heirs of White Mountain. In fact, it turned out to be a propitious year for Dvořák who also married – his wife Anna, a talented pianist and singer, had been a pupil of his. As Dvořák’s star rose he formed friendships with several other composers including Janáček and Brahms, who championed the young Bohemian, while the older Smetana became something of a mentor. While much of his music, including his early Slavonic Dances, referenced the folk melodies of his home country, his career as a composer and educator also took him far from his homeland. And absence certainly made the heart grow fonder. In 1892 he was enticed to take up a position as director at the National Conservatory of Music in New York, a role he held for three years. And it was during that time in the States, where he discovered spirituals and the music of indigenous peoples, that he was inspired to produce a number of compositions including what remains his best-known piece – his Symphony No.9, ‘From the New World’. Homesickness (and financial changes) eventually saw Dvořák return to Europe where, looking for a new project, he produced his hugely successful opera Rusalka. He died in Prague on May 1, 1904 at the age of 62. Thousands of people attended his funeral.
Anna Clyne
Anna Clyne composed her first work at seven, and aged 11 she had her first piece performed at the Oxford Youth Prom. Three decades on, the London-born, US-based, Grammy-nominated Clyne has been described as “a composer of uncommon gifts” (New York Times) and is one of the most in-demand and performed composers today. She works with orchestras and ensembles, choreographers, filmmakers and visual artists across the globe and has been commissioned to create work by arts institutions and organisations including the Barbican, Carnegie Hall, the Royal Concertgebouw, LA Philharmonic, San Francisco Ballet and Sydney Opera House, and for festivals including the Edinburgh International Festival and Last Night of the Proms. The World Economic Forum commissioned her to write Restless Oceans, which was premiered at its annual meeting in 2019 by an all-woman orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop. Clyne has been a composer in residence with several orchestras including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia, Helsinki Philharmonic, and BBC Philharmonic. From 2019-22 she was associate composer with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. She composes widely for orchestra, chamber ensembles, brass ensembles, choral and vocal works. One of her earliest pieces for chamber orchestra was Within Her Arms, which was written in memory of her mother and premiered in Los Angeles in 2009. Other key compositions include Night Ferry, Masquerade and Midnight Hour, and her violin concerto The Seamstress.
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.
About the Music
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Overture, Carnival
Composed: 1891 First Performed: 28 April 1892, Prague, Rudolfinum, National Theatre Orchestra, cond. Dvořák Dvořák’s brilliant, exuberant Carnival Overture is the centrepiece of an orchestral trilogy, the other two pieces being the tone poems In Nature’s Realm and Othello – informally he called the whole cycle ‘Nature, Life and Love’. In the words of his biographer, the three pieces represent ‘the impression of the solitary, wrapped about by the exalted stillness of the summer night; the impression of a man seized into the joyous vortex of life, and finally the feeling of a man in the power of a violent love poisoned by jealousy.’ Together they make a powerful triptych, but understandably Carnival has taken on a life of its own, its depiction of the ‘joyous vortex of life’ treasured for its own sake, without the baleful reminder (Othello) that joy and love can go terribly wrong. High spirits, collective elation alternate with tenderness, and passing hints of more shadowy things. At its heart, Carnival looks back to the pastoral music of In Nature’s Realm, but you don’t need to know that to enjoy its lyrical reflection. At the end, joy returns, sweeping all before it.
Anna Clyne Glasslands for saxophone and orchestra
Composed: 2022 First Performed: 18 February 2023, Detroit, Orchestra Hall, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Jess Gillam (saxophone), cond. Han-Na Chang Glasslands is the second piece Anny Clyne has written for the charismatic virtuoso saxophonist Jess Gillam. It follows the aptly entitled Snake and Ladder, and here the sense of vertiginous brilliance and peril is even more up-front. The three sections of Glasslands evoke three different moods and faces of the Banshee, the legendary Irish spirit whose nocturnal wailing, shrieking and keening reacts to the death of a member of a community, or sometimes, still more chillingly, foretells it. As in Snake and Ladder, Clyne chooses the soprano saxophone, an instrument with a huge expressive range, shrill or slyly coaxing, bright and brilliant or eerily remote, fragile or terrifyingly assertive. Rarely has the Banshee been enabled to speak so searingly for herself.
Anton Bruckner (1824-96): Symphony No 6 in A major
1. Majestoso 2. Adagio: Sehr feierlich (Very solemn) 3. Scherzo: Nicht schnell (Not fast) – Trio: Langsam (Slow) – Scherzo 4. Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell (Lively, but not too fast) Composed: 1879-81 First Performed: 26 February 1899, Graz (Austria), cond. Gustav Mahler When Bruckner wrote his Sixth Symphony he was at a low ebb. He’d moved to Vienna from his Upper Austrian homeland full of hopes – where better than the home city of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to make a stunning success as a composer? But Vienna was either indifferent or actively scornful, and the disastrous first performance of his Third Symphony in 1877, followed by a mauling in the musical press, brought him close to despair. Bruckner is often said to have lacked confidence as man and artist, but the fact that he carried on composing after this – and carried on writing symphonies – suggests that at a deeper level his sense of ‘vocation’ (as this intensely religious man described it) remained strong. Though he didn’t realise it then, vindication was just around the corner – the premiere of the Fourth Symphony, not long after the Sixth was finished, was to be a breakthrough. But given the circumstances it’s not surprising that the Sixth Symphony sounds more inward-looking, enigmatic, and less affirmative in its ending than any of its great neighbours. Perhaps for that reason, the Sixth has tended to be neglected in the concert hall. But it offers rich rewards. Despite its often sombre tone, the slow movement is a beautiful meditation, culminating in a gorgeous long coda mostly for the strings, and the magical, mysterious nocturnal Scherzo clearly left a deep impression on Bruckner’s younger friend Gustav Mahler, who conducted the first performance. It’s the outer movements that puzzle some people. The first seems more dynamic and rhythmically driven than is typical in mature Bruckner, but shifts in tone and perspective can be puzzling for the first-time listener. Trust Bruckner – he knows where he’s going – and the magnificent coda will draw everything together. The Finale is darker, more nervous, and often it seems to question itself just when it’s getting going. There is a massive reaffirmation of the first movement theme at the end, but this time (in contrast to the other mature symphonies) the questions – doubts? – can still linger. But that only makes this remarkable symphony all the more fascinating. Faith can be strengthened by opening itself to doubt, and perhaps that’s what we hear in Symphony No 6. As we’ve seen, that faith would soon be vindicated.
Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840-93): Symphony No 6 in B minor, op 74, Pathétique
1. Adagio – Allegro non troppo 2. Allegro con grazia 3. Allegro molto vivace 4. Finale: Adagio lamentoso Composed: 1893 First Performed: 28 October 1893, St Petersburg, cond. Tchaikovsky Early in 1893, Tchaikovsky returned home to Russia after an extended foreign trip, brim-full of ideas. Within four days he had completed the first movement of a new symphony, his Sixth. ‘You cannot imagine what bliss I feel’, he wrote to his nephew Vladimir (‘Bob’) Davidov, ‘assured that my time has not yet passed and that I can still work.’ This time the symphony came with a programme, ‘but with such a programme that will remain a mystery to everyone – let them guess.’ Even with his Bob (to whom he dedicated the Sixth Symphony) Tchaikovsky was guarded: ‘the programme itself, whatever it may be, is imbued with subjectivity, and quite often during my wandering, composing it in my mind, I wept terribly.’ He did give it a title though, in Russian Pateticheskaya, meaning ‘passionate’ or ‘intensely emotional’. There’s been a lot of speculation as to that ‘programme’: is this turbulent, ultimately death-haunted symphony some kind of suicide note? Is it some kind of gay manifesto: the confession of a man troubled by his homosexuality, or more asserting through music what Tchaikovsky’s contemporary Oscar Wilde had called ‘the love that dare not speak its name’? In which case, why the tragic ending? We’ll never know, but the answer may simply lie in Tchaikovsky’s own hypersensitive, depressive nature. From most of his life Tchaikovsky was obsessed with death. The sight of an elderly or seriously ill human being could throw him into a state of introspective gloom that lasted for days. Perhaps Tchaikovsky had decided to put his feelings about death, about the briefness of youth and beauty and the certainty of decay and dissolution, into the Sixth Symphony. But he was also full of plans for the future. In all probability his premature death (he was just 52) that same year was nothing more than coincidence – though it has added enormously to the mystique surrounding his last, and many would say his greatest symphony. The long and dramatic first movement contrasts dark, sepulchral sounds, with music of impassioned flight and an ardent, full-blooded slower theme that clearly stands for love. It ends however in a dignified processional – a funeral march? The second movement seems to seek worldly distraction in an elegant waltz, and yet its five-beats-to-a-bar pulse is strangely destabilising. The fast march-like Allegro that follows is almost over-full with life, its final climaxes thrilling but more than slightly manic. Then comes emotional collapse: a dark, grief-saturated slow movement, building to a catastrophic climax, then falling inconsolably into minor-key blackness, with an unmistakable dying heartbeat in the bass. Here, at least, Tchaikovsky’s ‘programme’ is easily guessed.