One of the most enduring and productive partnerships in British orchestral life comes to an end next summer, when after 16 years Kirill Karabits steps down as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor although he will continue his relationship with the orchestra as conductor emeritus, and continuing his Voices from the East series, focusing on music from his native Ukraine and other former Soviet states that’s little known in the west.
So Karabits began the first concert of his final season with a suite from the ballet The Scarlet Flower by Thomas de Hartmann, who was born in Ukraine (in 1884), studied in St Petersburg, and then after the revolution seems to have led a colourfully peripatetic life as a disciple of the mystic George Gurdjieff, before eventually settling in the US. To judge from these samples from the third of the ballet’s six acts, The Scarlet Flower is a spectacularly coloured score, with obvious debts to Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, but totally assured. It’s music that really puts an orchestra through its paces, but the BSO relished all its challenges, utterly secure in every department.
