A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Opera Recording!

Melodious and charming, The Cunning Little Vixen is a work rooted in Czech history and folk music; a sentimental journey through the cycles of life. For Sir Simon Rattle, it’s a deeply personal and emotional work. "It’s the piece that made me want to become an opera conductor... and still one of the pieces that reduces me to tears more easily than any other," says the LSO's Music Director. Towering fanfares open Janá?ek’s Sinfonietta, an ode to the composer’s hometown of Brno in the now Czech Republic. It’s a portrait composed for a national celebration of Slavic culture, with Janá?ek’s love of musical tradition evident in dancing strings and celebratory brass.

Composed against a cataclysmic backdrop of Stalinist oppression and the Second World War, Shostakovich's Symphony No.8 is a deeply affecting poem of suffering. The composer described it as, ''an attempt to reflect the terrible tragedy of war,'' and it contains some of the most terrifying music he ever wrote. Here, Gianandrea Noseda conducts the London Symphony Orchestra with intensity and understanding, allowing the music to tell its own story as it travels from darkness into light, yearning more for peace than for victory.