Kirill Karabits’s years with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra have regularly championed music from eastern Europe, including Karabits’native Ukraine. This year’s BSO Proms visit was no exception, opening with a celebration of Kyiv written by Karabits’ late father Ivan. But it was a Russian, Sergei Rachmaninov, whose music emphatically defined this concert in the end.
Ivan Karabits’s single movement First Concerto for orchestra was composed in 1980-1, to mark the 1,500th anniversary of Kyiv. It is a professional piece of scoring, moving deftly from episode to episode. It begins in declamatory mode, like a lot of Soviet-era music, but its most effective writing was more reflective, a lingering flute solo against soft cello accompaniment, and the fragmentary celesta of its final bars, one of several echoes of Shostakovich’s influence.
