Brighton and East Sussex Youth Orchestra

Peter Davison conductor

Curtis Phill Hsu piano (Winner of Hastings International Piano Competition 2024)

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op 18

Ethel Smyth The Wreckers Overture

LeFanu Airs and Fanfares

Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre

Aged 19, US-born Curtis Phill Hsu won the biennial Hastings International Piano Competition in 2024, having impressed the jury with his “artistry, musical maturity and technical brilliance”. He now returns to the Brighton Festival, following an impressive lunchtime recital of Debussy Préludes last year, to play Rachmaninoff’s hyper-romantic Second Piano Concerto alongside the youngsters of the Brighton and East Sussex Youth Orchestra.

Written in 2024 for the young players of York’s Yorchestra, veteran British composer Nicola LeFanu’s exuberant Airs and Fanfares – alternating fanfares that showcase the brass with airs that foreground the woodwind – were specifically designed so as to, in her words,“ allow the advanced players to shine, but not daunt the less experienced”.

To complete the programme, the tempestuous overture to pioneering suffragette composer Ethel Smyth’s Edwardian opera about murderous Cornish sea scavengers is offset against Saint-Saëns’s violin-led Hallowe’en vision of Death fiddling while skeletons dance on their graves.

Artistic Director of the Brighton and East Sussex Youth Orchestra since its foundation in 2021, Peter Michael Davison enjoys a busy career in both the concert hall and the recording studio, and is equally comfortable conducting the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra or the soundtrack to Casualty.