The Athens-born violinist Leonidas Kavakos plays Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra under Gianandrea Noseda, between two Prokofiev stage suites.
The Athens-born violinist Leonidas Kavakos plays Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Hall on Thursday 10 December 2026. Gianandrea Noseda conducts.
Kavakos was born in 1967 into a musical family and began the violin at five. He studied at the Hellenic Conservatory, then with Josef Gingold at Indiana on an Onassis scholarship.
He made his debut at the Athens Festival at seventeen. He won the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki the following year and the Paganini soon after, and he now conducts as well.
Shostakovich wrote the concerto for Oistrakh in 1967, the year Kavakos was born, when the composer’s health was failing. It is the later and darker of his two violin concertos.
Noseda is the orchestra’s principal guest conductor and music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington and of Zurich Opera. This is the first of his two Barbican visits this season, both given to Russian repertoire.
He frames the concerto with two suites from Prokofiev’s music for the stage. The Love for Three Oranges is the fairytale of a prince cursed to love three oranges, and Chout is The Buffoon.