The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra performs its Eastern Odyssey tour, featuring works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Saint-Saƫns and Mozart, conducted by Charlotte Corderoy with Junyan Chen on piano.
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra bring their Eastern Odyssey tour to Portsmouth Guildhall on Thursday 29 October, with the concert starting at 7pm. It's part of the Guildhall's classical series for 2026/2027, so it's one of several orchestral nights they've got lined up across the season.
The evening is built around Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, which the composer described as "separate, unconnected episodes and pictures" drawn from The Arabian Nights. It's a Romantic showpiece that's become a landmark in descriptive music, held together by a recurring motif: the bewitching melody of the solo violin, the voice of Scheherazade herself. The whole programme is tied together by the sea, with all six works on the bill inspired by it.
Alongside Scheherazade, you'll hear Mozart's overture to Don Giovanni, which is praised for capturing the spirit of the opera without quoting all its famous numbers. Then there's Saint-Saƫns' Piano Concerto No. 2, a youthful, high-spirited work with virtuosic passages and arpeggios that build to a tempestuous finale. There's a well-known witticism that it "begins with Bach and ends with Offenbach," and that's a fair way to describe the ground it covers.
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Charlotte Corderoy conducts the orchestra, and Junyan Chen takes the piano for the Saint-SaĆ«ns. Tickets run from Ā£15 to Ā£31, and the concert starts at 7pm at Portsmouth Guildhall, Guildhall Square, Portsmouth PO1 2AB.
