Symphony concert 5

»Silence can mean death,« Beethoven noted in his sketchbook. In his dramatic overture to Goethe’s »Egmont«, he captures the rebellious spirit and tragic fate of his hero in riveting tones. Dmitri Shostakovich also personally experienced how dangerous a rousing inflection can be for an artist: the Stalinist regime threatened him with terrible consequences were he to pursue his artistic path as before. With his Fifth Symphony he seemed, externally, to have assimilated the ruling powers’ rules of the game. Under the smoothed-out surface, however, there simmers all the more clearly the rebellion of a repressed existence. In Felix Mendelssohn’s first piano concerto, too, a sensitive soul is hidden below the sparkling surface, and the song of the soul rises from the piano. An artless virtuoso piece? The poetic document of a young love? Three songs of joy in minor. Alexander Melnikov and Thomas Søndergård will search for the appropriate nuances.