BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Wins Prestigious Award

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra has been awarded the 2009 Gramophone Award for Best Concerto Recording.

The winning performance is for Britten’s complete works for piano & orchestra with pianist, Steven Osborne.

The winning recording, conducted by the orchestra’s former Chief Conductor (now Principal Guest Conductor) Ilan Volkov, plays Britten’s Piano Concerto, Diversions for left-hand piano and orchestra, and Young Apollo.

The three compositions, which comprise Britten’s music for solo piano and orchestra, constitute a unique yet still marginally explored part of his output.

Steven Osborne’s performance of Britten’s Concerto with the BBC SSO and Ilan Volkov at the BBC Proms in 2007, laid down a modern benchmark with regards to performance of this music.

The final recording also featured the original third movement which Britten discarded in his 1945 revision.

Presented in London, the Classic FM Gramophone Awards are regarded as the world’s most influential classical music prize; they are now in their 31st year.

This is the fourth Gramophone Award presented to the BBC SSO and its second consecutive prize.

In 2008, it won Best Contemporary Recording Prize for its performance of Jonathan Harvey’s Body Mandala.

Prior to this,in 1992, the orchestra took the award for Best Concerto Recording, with pianist Nikolai Demidenko and, in 1993, it won best Contemporary Recording for James MacMillan’s The Confession of Isobel Gowdie.

The orchestra was also nominated twice in the concerto category at the 2008 awards.

Britten: Complete works for piano & orchestra

Hyperion: CDA67625
Steven Osborne (piano) with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with Ilan Volkov, conductor
Recorded September 2007, City Halls, Glasgow, Scotland
Produced by Andrew Keener, Engineered by Simon Eadon, Released September 2008

Photo: The Scallop by Maggi Hambling - dedicated to Benjamin Britten on the beach a Aldeburgh: “I hear those voices that will not be drowned.”