RSO, Heras-Casado & Perianes (concert video)

24 Sep 2016

Watch the entire performance via Areenaa Online

Inside Mendelssohn’s Symphony No 3, ‘Scottish’

02 Sep 2016

Gramophone Magazine

Conductors have these pieces, totems you might call them, which guide them at momentous times. For Pablo Heras-Casado, as it was for Dimitri Mitropoulos, that totem is Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. He could hardly have planned to make his debut in January with the Vienna Philharmonic in the piece, in place of the recently retired Nikolaus Harnoncourt. And many of his other important debuts – in London, Salzburg, Munich and Berlin among others – have come with a work that he singles out as the most original and satisfying answer to the problem of the symphony addressed in the difficult generation of the 1830s and ’40s, when so many composers were at once inspired and overawed by Beethoven’s example. ‘This piece has everything,’ he says.