Conductors don’t normally receive a standing ovation before they have even reached the podium, but these are not normal times. Ukrainian-born Kirill Karabits was making his first appearance with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra since Russia invaded his homeland, and the Poole audience, many of them brandishing sunflowers, the national flower of Ukraine, gave him the warmest possible welcome. As he explained in a brief speech, Karabits had considered changing his programme to include a work by a Ukrainian composer, but reckoned that, over the 13 years that he has been the orchestra’s chief, the BSO had probably performed more Ukrainian music than any other orchestra outside the country itself, and so he had decided to leave things as planned.
In fact the concert ended with a work whose finale has often been regarded as a symbol of resistance to Russian rule, Sibelius’s Second Symphony. Like all the really convincing Sibelius conductors, Karabits did not impose himself obviously on the music, never pushing too hard or micro-managing the phrases, yet his performance still had real cumulative power, and the various strands of the belligerent finale were drawn together with unanswerable conviction.
