Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov got no closer to the Far East than a family holiday to Istanbul. Thankfully his extraordinary musical imagination carried him the rest of the way - with a little help from the iconic poetry collection The Arabian Nights. Rimsky’s spellbinding musical adventure inspired by those poems is surely the greatest piece of orchestral storytelling in history - a story of the young Sultana Scheherazade’s scented stories and a love-letter to the Orient from a composer who longed to be there.
Fast-rising conductor Jader Bignamini conducts Rimsky’s masterpiece here, after the great Leonidas Kavakos plays Tchaikovsky’s spectacular Violin Concerto and the Norwegian premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Herald, Holler and Hallelujah - a celebration of the brilliance and swagger of the orchestra’s brass and percussion sections.