This February, as the Symphony Orchestra of India enters its 20th anniversary season, prepare to immerse yourself in the sounds of the great masters with Carlo Rizzi and Martyn Brabbins.
By Dr. Karl Lutchmayer
Early in January, Carlo Rizzi and Martyn Brabbins were bracing themselves for arctic temperatures as Storm Goretti hit the west of the UK, where they both live. The maestros were only too pleased to be thinking of their imminent return to Mumbai, where they will be this month for the 20th anniversary season of the Symphony Orchestra of India.
A frequent SOI guest conductor, Brabbins smiled warmly speaking of how he and the orchestra always have “a great time together as a group of musicians working, breathing, exploring and developing the whole creative process of rehearsing and performing.” Now, in his role as Chief Conductor of the SOI, he is looking forward to “opening up the repertoire a little bit”, not least in performing some of the English repertoire for which he is so well known. Brabbins spoke enthusiastically about his relationship with the music of Gustav Holst whose orchestral suite, The Planets, features in the opening concert. “This will be the second time I’ve conducted it in Mumbai,” he adds. “Of course, Holst and I share the fact that we were both trombone players and I live quite close to Cheltenham where he was born. I’m also connected to the Holst birthplace museum. Holst, indeed, means a lot to me. I think he was a great figure and it’s rather sad that he’s considered a one-horse composer.”
Brabbins notes that there is an amazing wealth of other great pieces by Holst, but The Planets is “a towering masterpiece.” The orchestral suite depicts seven planets, with the English composer leaving out Earth. Pluto was not discovered in 1914, which is when he started composing the suite. Brabbins adds, “It has influenced the music that came after it, from Vaughan Williams through to Richard Strauss and beyond. They took inspiration from the way in which he was able to picture and clothe these wonderful images of the planets in such incredible detail and precise musical form. He encapsulated all the spirits of the different characteristics of the planets—it’s a work of perfection.”
I asked Brabbins whether he had any plans to programme works that Holst had written inspired by the Indian literature he read after studying Sanskrit. Turns out, he has already mooted a theatrical performance of the small chamber opera, Sāvitri. “It’s worth remembering that Holst had a fascination for everything from India, and obviously it had a big impact on him,” he says.
Like Brabbins, one of Carlo Rizzi’s concerts also explores a passion of his: Italian song. Although universally known as a leading exponent of Italian opera, he still performs and records as a collaborative pianist and was particularly excited to discuss his ongoing series of recordings devoted to Donizetti’s songs, the seventh volume of which will be released later this year. It was in this role that he first encountered the popular songs by Francesco Paolo Tosti and Salvatore Cardillo. “I’ve done these pieces as a pianist with singers many times,” Rizzi confirms. “I love this repertoire; it requires a lot of detail and attention to the particulars and the nuances in order to capture the mood of the era. Doing it with the orchestra obviously adds some colour and three-dimensionality to the sound, but it’s important not to lose the simplicity and the originality of the piano score.”
A regular conductor at La Scala in Milan, he will head to the Metropolitan Opera in New York after Mumbai to conduct Madama Butterfly. According to Rizzi, opera conductors (including Brabbins who has spent seven years as Music Director of the English National Opera) bring another dimension to the music when they conduct the symphonic repertoire. “There is a breathing feeling, with little changes—a hesitation, or getting faster—that you cannot even explain to the orchestra. You cannot say these two notes are slow and these two notes are faster. In fact, this is why I think it will be very difficult for AI to replicate what we do, let alone emulate the relationship of the performers to the public,” Rizzi adds.
His first concert offers the unusual pairing of Antonín Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony with Jean Sibelius’s Second. These works are old and dear friends that, unlike opera performances, Rizzi often enjoys conducting by heart. For him, putting them together is really a question of atmosphere. “Already from the beginning, with its cellos and violas, the Dvořák—which meanders later—isn’t the typical dynamic opening theme of a symphony. In some ways, the Sibelius is the same. Of course, you get the famous theme, but it is more about the play of orchestration, and so they seem to work together, and express a world that is so very different from Mumbai!”
Brabbins’s second concert offers an equally unusual journey from Felix Mendelssohn to Dmitri Shostakovich via Gustav Mahler. He considers Mendelssohn to have been a fantastically gifted natural musician, a view echoed by NCPA Chairman and SOI co-founder, Mr. Khushroo N. Suntook who was “very keen to include some Mendelssohn”. Brabbins notes that Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage has an English connection in being quoted by Edward Elgar towards the end of the Enigma Variations. “It paves the way for the symphonic poems that came later from other composers,” he says. “It is as much a tone poem as an overture, a beautiful piece with great poetry in it; we all want to be caressed by a lovely story and in this piece, we get that from Mendelssohn.”
For Brabbins, Mahler and Shostakovich are linked in outlook, and he is sure that Mahler would have loved Shostakovich’s works as much as the latter loved Mahler’s. As such, Songs of a Wayfarer “fit very well” in the programme. He adds, “We’re so lucky to have Dame Sarah Connolly joining us. She is a consummate artiste and I think it may be a defining moment for audiences in Mumbai to hear that artistry—the depth of her understanding of music, her authenticity, her commitment and her strength.”
The concert concludes with Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, which Brabbins considers one of the composer’s “profoundest and most powerful statements”. Whilst acknowledging Shostakovich’s potentially apocryphal statement that the symphony is all about Stalin, Brabbins is keen to remind us that the third movement entwines the composer’s musical initials, in the form of the D-S-C-H musical cipher, with a horn theme which pays tribute to his lifelong friend, the composer Elmira Nazirova. “The sense of the conflicts in his life, both private and public, are on display, and although it ends in a blaze of glory, one is never quite sure if it is meant to be glorious or sarcastic.”
Finally, I asked each conductor about their relationship with the Beethoven symphonies which the SOI will be performing as a cycle over the next two years. Although the Fifth Symphony has achieved ubiquity in global culture due to its opening movement and the powerful construct of destiny knocking at the door, we mustn’t overlook the fact that it is what Rizzi calls an “incredibly lively” symphony. “I’m particularly interested in the journey into the fourth movement as it explodes into C major, but above all, I love the elegance and pathos of the second movement. I don’t even know if it’s positive or sad music, but it’s definitely something that gets into your heart,” he explains.
Conversely, Brabbins emphasises the revolution ushered in by Beethoven’s First Symphony which, even whilst Joseph Haydn was still alive, set the tone for 19th-century musical aesthetics. “It still owes a debt to Haydn and Mozart, but it opens the door to what comes afterwards. The piece starts on a dissonance. Goodness knows what audiences would have thought of that,” says Brabbins. “Beethoven is probably the most radical composer in music history. Before we talk about the monumental nature of the rest of the repertoire Beethoven produced, from piano sonatas through to string quartets, let’s remember that he reinvents so many aspects of the symphonic form in every piece he writes. That, in itself, is something extraordinary. There is something single-minded and unbelievably powerful and irresistible about his creativity and it comes across in this symphony.”
Whilst the meteorological storm has now abated in the UK, we can be certain that for this anniversary season of the SOI, the Beethovinian tempest is about to rise.
This article was originally published in the February 2026 issue of ON Stage.
