BBC SSO 2021-22 Season Afternoon Performance: Volkov in Venice

In 1765, a young James Boswell visited Venice and wasn’t impressed. He complained of ‘travelling continually by water, shut up in those lugubrious gondolas’. Over 200 years later, Bruno Maderna used the Scotsman’s visit to his home city to create a mash-up of 18th and 20th-century musical styles, to often very funny effect. Boswell made little record of the music he heard on his grand tour but our Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov offers some suggestions: Frescobaldi, who had already left his mark on the Italian style, Rameau’s opera about a nymph seduced by Neptune and, surely, Haydn, whose joyous 'Symphony No.82' is thought to imitate the drone of bagpipes in its last movement.