Thu, 30. 3. 2023, 7.00 p.m.

A6 SYMPHONY OF STRINGS

Venue: Zlín Congress Centre  |  Organizer: Filharmonie Bohuslava Martinů, o.p.s.  | 

Tonight's concert by the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic Orchestra under its Chief Conductor Robert Kružík features works by three important Russian composers - Rimsky-Korsakov, Kabalevsky and Shostakovich.

Rimsky-Korskakov's four-act opera The Tsar's Bride, a drama full of passion and gore set in the times of Ivan the Terrible, depicts a convoluted and tragic love story. Written in 1899, it has since become a staple in the repertoire of many Russian opera companies.

The first of Dmitry Kabalevsky's two cello concertos was composed in 1949 and premiered that year by the eminent cellist Sviatoslav Knushevitsky, to whom it was dedicated. Our soloist tonight is the young Romanian cellist Andrei Ioniță, a laureate of the international Tchaikovsky competition.

When the Soviet Army liberated part of Europe in spring 1945, Shostakovich announced that he was working on a new symphony, his ninth, to celebrate the Soviet victory. His earlier symphonies, particularly the seventh and eighth, were truly monumental in scale and few expected the ninth to rise to even greater heights, but what the composer completed in August 1945 was a surprise to everyone, and a disappointment to many. Instead of a magnum opus exalting the heroism of the Red Army, it was, by the composer's standards, a somewhat lightweight affair full of cynical humour. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the ideologically committed Soviet critique ripped it to shreds, condemning it for its alleged weakness, although this was a response that Shostakovich had anticipated when he wrote shortly after finishing it that "musicians will like to play it, but the critics will take delight in lambasting it". But despite the unflattering party critique, the Ninth Symphony, sometimes described as Shostakovich's most Classical symphony with its conciseness, clarity of form and sense of intimacy, did find favour with the public.