Israel Philharmonic Orchestra

The star conductor Lahav Shani was appointed Principal Conductor of Rotterdam’s Philharmonisch Orkest in 2018 and two years later officially took up his post as Music Director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, which is regarded as one of the world’s leading orchestras and a musical ambassador for the state of Israel. As part of his first European tour as the orchestra’s new principal conductor, Shani will present music from the First Symphony by Paul Ben-Haim, a composer who fled the Nazis and a work first performed by what was then the Palestine Orchestra in 1941: “The horrors spread by the forces of evil have definitely left a mark on my work. Nevertheless, the work remains pure and absolute music.” This is followed by “Many Waters” by the celebrated Israeli composer Betty Olivero, whom Luciano Berio called “a very impressive voice in Jewish culture” and was heralded by the New York Times as “a great discovery”. The programme after the interval consists of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” opus 45. This was the composer’s final work, written on Long Island in 1940, and – alternating between waltzes and pandemonium – it is full of allusions and quotations that look back on an eventful musical life. “A composer’s music,” Rachmaninoff commented laconically, “should express the land of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books that have inspired him and the pictures he loves.”