This leading young orchestra, “the upbeat to the future of classical music”, returns with Beethoven’s high-spirited Seventh Symphony and the UK premiere of Pál Hermann’s Cello Concerto.

Sinfonia Smith Square comprises some of the finest young artists in the country. This concert features their brilliant music-making in a symphony that Beethoven thought to be among his best pieces. For the UK premiere of Pál Hermann’s Cello Concerto they are joined by soloist Sam Lucas.

The evening will begin with a 10-minute introduction at 7.30pm, where Kate Kennedy will discuss Pál Hermann’s Cello Concerto. Kate is a broadcaster and presenter at BBC Radio 3 as well as the author of “Cello – a journey through silence to sound”.

Pál Hermann was born in Budapest in 1902 and became one of the leading cello virtuosos of his generation. He had also studied composition with Bartók and Kodály, and is known to have written a wide range of works before his early death in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis. Many of his pieces were lost, but the manuscript of his unfinished Cello Concerto from 1925 survived. In 2016 Hermann’s daughter and grandson asked Italian composer Fabio Conti to complete the work and it finally received its world premiere in 2018 some 90 years after Hermann’s murder.

Tonight’s soloist has a particular link with this work. Hermann’s own cello had been lost during the war and its aftermath, but after years of searching by his biographer Kate Kennedy, the instrument was found on loan to Sam Lucas, then a student in Berlin, but who no idea of its heritage. Now deeply involved in his instrument’s story, Sam has played a section of the concerto’s first movement at Wigmore Hall for Hermann’s living relatives – the first time his daughter had heard her dead father’s cello for 85 years – and in the European Parliament to mark the 80th anniversary of the Holocaust. Sam, having made his name as a young international soloist on Hermann’s cello, is the nearest we can get to Hermann now and tonight gives the UK premiere of the completed concerto.

Download programme notes.

Sinfonia Smith Square
Kate Kennedy presenter
Sam Lucas cello
Simon Over conductor