Andris Nelsons and Hilary Hahn
For Hilary Hahn, Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto is “sonorous and romantic”, but also so rhythmic that it makes you think “of people stamping their feet and starting to dance”. The perfect work for the American violinist, whose expressive tone excels in both tender and energetic moments. Conductor Andris Nelsons takes us into a different world of sound in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. The work is a ruthless and powerful reckoning with the Stalin regime.
As if the organ were not complex enough with its manuals, pedals and registers, it seems to attract people who are looking for even greater challenges: Jan Liebermann, born in 2005, prefers to play his wide repertoire from memory – just like Marcel Dupré did in his day. The world-renowned composer, organist and teacher performed all of Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ works without sheet music in 1920. Here, the two virtuosos come together as Liebermann performs Dupré’s Cortège et Litanie – a devotional choral procession that blends with a more lively prayer.
“Would you like to write me a violin concerto? Something quite original, rich in cantilenas and suitable for good violinists? Please let me know!” Antonín Dvořák fulfilled this request from his publisher Fritz Simrock in 1879. However, the violinist Joseph Joachim, who the composer consulted, changed the first draft so thoroughly that Dvořák finally complained: “I haven’t been able to keep a single bar.” The premiere did not take place until 1883 – and Joachim wasn’t even the soloist. In his place, František Ondříček played the solo part, which is peppered with virtuoso cadenzas and traditional dance tunes, and whose resting point is the heartfelt second movement. The soloist here is Hilary Hahn, an exceptional performer who knows how to savour every nuance of expression.
Andris Nelsons, long-standing partner of the Berliner Philharmoniker, then conducts Dmitri Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. The haunting lamentations of isolated wind instruments at the beginning – symbolising the oppressed individual – are contrasted with the brutal sound machinery of the scherzo, which the composer himself is said to have described as a “portrait of Stalin”. Published in December 1953, shortly after the dictator’s death, this work is a reckoning and self-assertion by the previously humiliated Shostakovich – his name motif “DSCH” (D, E-flat, C, B natural) is omnipresent even in the grotesque Stalin scherzo, and triumphs at the end.
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