Silk Road Seasons

New Music Players
Shen Yue piano
Susanne Stanzeleit violin
Roger Montgomery conductor

East meets West in two groundbreaking world premieres. Nicholas Michael Smith’s The Four Seasons Beyond the Silk Road reframes Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons through a Chinese cultural lens, seamlessly weaving in timeless Chinese themes. Then, Beijing-based pianist Shen Yue premieres Ed Hughes’s Piano Concerto. This boundary-pushing work forges a thrilling synthesis of fierce modernist rhythms and traditional harmonic landscapes. Hughes draws inspiration from the pentatonic threads of an English folk song and the vibrant, traditional "silk and bamboo" music of Shanghai’s historic tea houses.

This is an external production presented at the Royal Academy of Music.