Thieves of souls

Scheherazade tells stories for her life. With 1,001 stories, she casts a spell over the sultan night after night, thus preventing him from killing her after spending just one night together, as he has so many other women before her. As seductively as Scheherazade, the solo violin in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Symphonic Suite entices listeners out to sea, enchants them with its storybook images, tells of princes and princesses, sets sail with Sindbad and makes the entire orchestra shine. Hector Berlioz’s concert overture Le Corsaire embarks on a stormy sea: inspired by Lord Byron’s tale of a pirate who is led all the way to the Orient because of his love of a woman and abhorrence of society, Berlioz shapes a pirate story on the waves of music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart too succumbed to the fascination of the oriental world, and surprisingly serves up a Turkish march in the third movement of his violin concerto. A young and exciting duo of artists will shape this concert: Benjamin Beilman is already one of the leading violinists of his generation, while Elim Chan is a shooting star as a conductor.