Programme Guide

Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto is one of the composer’s most concentrated works, strictly structured and of controlled expression. Its particular flavour is won through its similarities to Jewish folk music, with its shifts between cheerfulness and anguish. Folk influences can also be found in the first item on the evening’s programme, the Symphonie d’instruments à vent from Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Russian phase’, which also produced the ballets Petrushka, The Firebird and Le Sacre du printemps.

The second item is Arnold Schoenberg’s tone poem Verklärte Nacht. The composer himself reported that, at the time of its first performance, it seemed to the audience “as if an orchestra playing Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde had got confused and their playing had fallen apart.” Today, on the other hand, the work is widely regarded as one of the most powerful masterpieces of the modern age.