Shostakovich's Fifth
Location: Exeter
Date: 04-02-2010
Time: 19:30
Venue Details: University Great Hall
Works Performed
- Brahms : Academic Festival Overture
- Beethoven : Piano Concerto No.1
- Shostakovich : Symphony No.5
Performers
- Conductor : Matthew Wood
- Soloist: Juho Pohjonen (Piano)
Perhaps Brahms’ most ebullient work, the Academic Festival Overture uses material from four student drinking songs and was therefore a rather irreverent but nonetheless a grand, lively, and thoroughly entertaining work of joy and celebration.
The influence of Mozart is apparent throughout Beethoven’s C major Piano Concerto. The piano’s role ornaments the orchestral material, but the broad artistic expressiveness shows Beethoven’s embrace of the emerging Romantic mood of the day.
A deep personal anxiety and sense of suffering underlies Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. It is indeed a "response to criticism" but it is a much more tragic and anguished response than the Soviet authorities chose to believe. Many members of the audience wept at the premiere, and the applause following the performance lasted nearly half an hour - facts that were reported in the official press as an emotional response to its uplifting conclusion.
“If we needed proof that an exciting new talent is in the pipeline, there was the marvellous American debut of Juho Pohjonen at [Carnegie's] Weill Recital Hall. He offered a formidable mixed program, topped by thrilling accounts of two fiendishly difficult works.”
New York Times
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