Voices from the East, a series of concerts featuring composers from Russia and Ukraine who are little known in the west, has run through Kirill Karabits’s years as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor. Proud Ukrainian though he is, he has persisted with these programmes over the last year, and the latest included three more revivals, alongside what is arguablythe greatest and most challenging of Shostakovich’s symphonies.
One of the composers that Karabits has particularly championed has been Feodor Akimenko – he gave the world premiere of the Ukrainian’s recently unearthed cello concerto last autumn – and Karabits began here with Akimenko’s tiny Nocturne, whose central cello solo might well have been intended for the same player as the concerto. It’s a slight piece, but as Karabits said, with the first anniversary of the Russian invasion only days away, it acquired extra, poignant significance.
