An evening of music that journeys through art, history and the resilience of the human spirit.
Starting with Kabalevsky's sparkling Colas Breugnon Overture, a work bursting with energy, wit and infectious optimism. We then turn to one of classical music's greatest masterpieces, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, heard in Ravel's dazzling orchestral version. Inspired by a gallery of paintings, each movement brings a vivid scene to life, from playful chicks and bustling marketplaces to the majestic Great Gate of Kyiv.
The second half culminates in Shostakovich's monumental Symphony No. 11, "The Year 1905", an epic and deeply moving musical drama. With its cinematic power, haunting melodies and overwhelming orchestral climaxes, it is one of the composer's most gripping and emotionally charged works.
From brilliance and colour to profound human drama, this promises to be a spectacular evening of classical music at Romsey Abbey.
Romsey Abbey, Romsey
Saturday 22nd May 2027 - 7:30pm
Ticket Prices: TBC
The Programme
Kabalevsky's Colas Breugnon Overture is a burst of pure theatrical energy, composed in 1938 as the curtain-raiser to his opera based on Romain Rolland's novel of the same name. The story follows a jovial Burgundian woodcarver, a Rabelaisian figure full of wit, mischief and an unshakeable love of life, and the overture captures his spirit in just a few exhilarating minutes.
From the opening bars, the music races forward with dazzling string writing and puckish woodwind flourishes, conjuring a sense of mischief and irrepressible good humour. There is nothing solemn here: rhythms bounce and skip, themes chase one another with comic energy, and the orchestration sparkles with light, quick colour. A broader, more lyrical melody offers brief contrast, a nod perhaps to Colas's warmth beneath the bravado, before the music surges back into its whirlwind of high spirits.
It is a work of sheer craftsmanship and charm, a miniature portrait of a character too full of life to be contained. Where Shostakovich looks unflinchingly at tragedy, Kabalevsky offers the opposite: an overture that delights simply in the joy of being alive, and sends its audience off with a smile.
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition began life in 1874 as a solo piano suite, written in memory of his friend, the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann, who had died suddenly the year before. Grief-stricken, Mussorgsky visited a memorial exhibition of Hartmann's paintings and drawings, and transformed what he saw there into music, a set of vivid character sketches linked by a recurring "Promenade" theme representing the visitor walking from picture to picture. Today the work is most often heard in Ravel's dazzling orchestration, which brings out every ounce of its colour.
Each movement conjures its own world: the lumbering menace of Gnomus, the melancholy grandeur of an Old Castle, the delicate chatter of children in the Tuileries Gardens, the creaking weight of a Polish ox-cart in Bydlo. Elsewhere, humour and grotesquerie mingle: unhatched chicks scurry and peep, two Jewish figures argue in sharply contrasted voices, and a bustling French marketplace gives way suddenly to the hushed darkness of the Catacombs. The witch Baba Yaga erupts in a frenzy of orchestral menace before the suite reaches its overwhelming conclusion in the Great Gate of Kiev, a movement of towering, bell-ringing splendour.
Through it all, the Promenade returns, transformed each time by what has come before, reminding us that this is not just a gallery of pictures, but a journey through one man's memory and grief. It stands as one of the most inventive and colourful works in the entire orchestral repertoire, a tribute both to an artist's imagination and to the friendship that inspired it.
Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 11 in G minor, “The Year 1905”
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 is one of his most powerful and dramatic creations, a vast musical fresco that reflects both history and human struggle. Written in 1957, it commemorates the events of 1905, when peaceful demonstrators in St Petersburg were fired upon outside the Winter Palace in what became known as Bloody Sunday.
Rather than a traditional symphony, Shostakovich gives us a film-like narrative in sound. A sense of tense stillness opens the work, the cold square before the storm, with distant drumbeats and softly tolling bells evoking a frozen city holding its breath. Folksongs and revolutionary melodies thread through the movements, not as propaganda but as echoes of ordinary voices swept into extraordinary events.
When the inevitable violence erupts, the music surges with overwhelming force: furious brass, relentless percussion and a driving energy that captures both terror and defiance. Yet woven through the drama are moments of aching sadness, remembrance and quiet dignity, a tribute not only to those who fell in 1905, but to all who suffer under oppression and injustice.
Though rooted in a specific moment in Russian history, Symphony No. 11 speaks far beyond its time. It is a work of conscience as much as artistry — solemn, deeply felt and profoundly human. In its final pages, bells ring again: not simply mourning the past, but reminding us of memory’s power, and of the enduring hope that even in darkness, voices of truth and courage will rise.