Leonidas Kavakos is the soloist for Shostakovich's Second Violin Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra under Gianandrea Noseda, framed by two Prokofiev suites for the stage.
Leonidas Kavakos was born in Athens in 1967 into a musical family, started the violin at five, studied at the Hellenic Conservatory and then, on an Onassis scholarship, with Josef Gingold at Indiana. He made his debut at the Athens Festival at seventeen, won the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki the following year and the Paganini not long after, and has spent four decades since as the Greek musician most often on a London stage — and almost never on a Greek bill. He conducts as well, increasingly.
Gianandrea Noseda is the London Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor and makes two Barbican visits this season, both turned toward Russian repertoire. This is the first. He is also music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington and of Zurich Opera.
Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto sits at the centre of the evening: the later and sparer of the two, written for Oistrakh, asking the soloist for line and nerve in roughly equal measure and offering almost nowhere to hide. Noseda frames it with two suites drawn from Prokofiev’s music for the stage, The Love for Three Oranges and Chout. Seven o’clock at the Barbican. For a calendar that spends most of its year on galas and touring laiko, this is the other half of Greek London: the concert hall, where the name on the bill is Greek and the repertoire is not.