Anna’s Playlist

Guest curator: Anna Petersen, NACO second oboe / English horn

Director and soloists: To be announced

Repertoire:
RACHMANINOV Piano Concerto No. 2, first movement
BARBER Violin Concerto, second movement
RODRIGO Concierto de Aranjuez, second movement (adagio)
DUKAS Fanfare from La Peri
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6, final movement
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR Ballade

The National Arts Centre Orchestra is delighted to present the second edition of our new NACO Playlist series, curated by the NAC Orchestra’s own Anna Peterson (second oboe / English horn)—a joyful and intimate look at the music that has shaped her life and art.

About her playlist, Anna says, “these are my absolute favourite excerpts from the orchestral repertoire—music that fires me up and makes me feel.”

This marvellous playlist is filled with powerful works that feature the full force of the orchestra—like the first movement of Sergei Rachmaninov’s beautiful Piano Concerto No. 2, which blurs the boundary between heaven and earth, and Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto (second movement), which flies like an arrow to the heart.

There are fast notes and heart-wrenchingly beautiful slow movements, as in composer Joaquin Rodrigo’s sublime Concierto de Aranjuez, and the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, which conveys the human condition in one movement. The great composer himself called his sixth symphony “the best thing I have ever composed.”

And there is nostalgia, as in Ballade by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a lush, cinematic work commissioned by the 1898 Three Choirs Festival on the recommendation of Edward Elgar, who recognized in the 23-year-old African-British musician as “a composer of the first rank.”