Published: 05 April 2011
Category: Artists

Leonidas Kavakos will play Brahms’s Violin Concerto with Bernard Haitink and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe at the Lucerne Easter Festival during April, as part of the festival’s Haitink Brahms Cycle. Later in the month, Kavakos will make his conducting debut with the Budapest Festival Orchestra in three concerts between April 16 and 18. The programme will include Weber, Bottesini and will conclude with Schumann’s second symphony. Kavakos last performed with the orchestra during August 2009, when they took the Bartók Violin Concerto to the BBC Proms and on tour to Spain to much acclaim:

“Romantic reverie was the key here in a reading which felt forever poised on the edge of dreams. Kavakos took his cue from the strumming harp, lyre-like at the start, lending the rapt opening theme an air of ancient fable... it was Kavakos’s miracles of fine shading that one took away from this performance, his stratospheric song blissfully duetting with celeste at the close of the slow movement like a fading memory.”
The Independent, August 2009

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