Festival Closing Concert

The programme brings together the profound emotional intensity of Dmitri Shostakovich and Rimsky-Korsakov’s legendary symphonic suite Scheherazade. In Maxim Vengerov’s interpretation, the violin becomes a voice of remarkable depth and expression, unfolding within the rich colours and sweeping sonorities of the symphony orchestra.

In Baku — a city where East and West meet — Scheherazade takes on a particular resonance, evoking a world of imagination, poetry, and the timeless allure of the East.

This concert will provide a distinguished finale to the second season of BIAF. The festival ends where it began, at the Philharmonic, with Scheherazade returning us to the figure of the storyteller herself — the woman who survives by ensuring that every night ends in the middle of a story. There is a fitting irony in closing a festival on the Caspian with a St Petersburg composer’s imagined East, performed in a city accustomed to answering such imaginings with a reality of its own.

A thousand and one nights: the tale continues.