Born in 1876 in Kharkiv, north-east Ukraine, Feodor Akimenko is best remembered as the first harmony and composition teacher of the teenage Igor Stravinsky. Akimenko himself had been one of Rimsky-Korsakov’s favourite pupils, and in the first decades of the 20th century he worked as a composer, pianist and choral conductor in several countries across Europe before finally settling in France, where he died in 1945. After his death, his archives found their way into the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and it was there that Kirill Karabits unearthed the full score of a Cello Concerto that Akimenko had composed in 1922, but which for unknown reasons had never been performed.
Karabits had intended to conduct the work’s first performance in Kharkiv earlier this year, but the Russian invasion put paid to that, and so it became the centrepiece of the concert with which he opened the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s new season. Victor Julien-Laferrière was the soloist, and two violinists from the orchestra that had been scheduled to give the Kharkiv premiere joined the BSO for the concert.
