Alan Gilbert / Inon Barnatan

»Even in the most terrible circumstances, music should never offend the ear, but should still bring pleasure, and so remain music throughout.« So Mozart once said – and we begin the programme with the last of the twelve great piano concertos he composed in Vienna during an amazing creative burst, before his stardom slowly began to fade and he wrote in a letter: »I shall never be well again.« And it does indeed seem as if he wrote the piece in 1786 with both a smile and a tear in his eye – something the musicologist Attila Csampai once characterised as »the cheerful sorrow of the late Mozart«. It contains joy and playfulness alongside melancholy and drama. After Mozart, the spotlight turns to Shostakovich, whose compositions also reflect his eventful life, torn between triumphs and disappointments. He constantly aspired to artistic independence, only to suffer regularly under the party doctrine of his homeland. His Tenth Symphony therefore feels like a sense of relief at being freed from a burden: it was composed in 1953 shortly after Stalin’s death – marking the at least temporary end of the most oppressive phase of censorship. Shostakovich himself remarked about his epic symphony that he wished to »convey human feelings and passions« with it. This moving work indeed sounds like a liberation from that era: a gloomy and brooding tone, reflecting past experiences, initially characterises long parts of the piece, but in the finale a more optimistic mood sets in.