One of the world's finest cellists and one of the 20th century's most challenging symphonies. This is the programme of Schumann and Shostakovich, a concert the Brno Philharmonic has been preparing for this week. Steven Isserlis is coming to Brno to perform Robert Schumann' s Cello Concerto.
The Cello Concerto was written by Schumann in the most joyful period of his life and career. "Soon after its première in 1860, it became a mainstay of the Romantic concertante repertoire, as one of the first concertos to develop an orchestral part in addition to the necessary virtuoso aspect, thus adding symphonic weight to the work," says musicologist Jan Špaček. Steven Isserlis, winner of many prestigious music awards, will be performing in Brno on the "Marquis de Corberon", Stradivarius cello from 1726, lent to him by the Royal Academy of Music in London. The concert, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, will take place on Thursday and Friday, 27 and 28 March 2025, at the Janáček Theatre.
The second half of the evening will feature the extremely impressive Symphony No.4 in C minor by Dmitri Shostakovich, with more than a hundred musicians taking to the stage. It is an extremely challenging piece from a technical perspective, but, lasting a little over an hour, it is also physically demanding to play. Shostakovich uses an orchestra of an unprecedented range of twenty woodwinds, seventeen brass including two tubas and a wide battery of percussion with two sets of timpani. "The sound of the symphony is refined and exotic, and you'd be hard pressed to find an equivalent. Just the first thirty bars of the first movement hint at the shifting boundaries of extremes: the cutting fortissimo of the instruments in the highest registers, the crushing gradual march with its aggressive percussion and then that fall into emptiness and ominous timelessness," says Špaček.
Shostakovich described his Fourth as his greatest work ever and claimed that he'd have been a very different composer if it had been played in 1936, when it was written, and he had been able to build on it. "We know, however, that if it had actually been heard then, the composer himself would probably not have survived 1936, and quite possibly neither would the score. After all, it is a psychologically effective testimony to the onset of fear, a sense of doom and reconciliation with cruel and ubiquitous death. It is an impressive symphonic portrait of triumphant evil," adds Špaček. From a purely musical point of view, even forgetting its testimony to a terrifying time, he believes it is a timeless masterpiece, a unique work of 20th century music in terms of its sound, construction and effect.
Steven Isserlis/ photo artist's FB page
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