National Arts Centre Orchestra | Ehnes and Beethoven’s Fifth (online)

Beethoven’s glorious Symphony No. 5 is music that gets under your skin, still inspiring and delighting more than two centuries after its first performance in 1808.

NACO Artist-in-Residence, James Ehnes, returns to Southam Hall to perform Camille Saint-Saëns’s spirited Introduction and Rondo capriccioso, boldly commissioned at age 15 by violin prodigy Pablo de Sarasate. Then James embraces Lili Boulanger’s delicately tender and sweet Nocturne, originally written for violin and piano, and arranged specially for this performance by the incomparable Sarah Slean.

Next, Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, for string orchestra, explodes with spirit and life, borrowing from American folk idioms to create a nostalgic narrative that turns to colourful celebration. James Ehnes closes the program with  Sarasate’s own Zigeunerweisen, by turns melodramatic and devil-may-care.