Zu Gast in Fulda

We open the concert with a »stream of orchestral life«: this is how the Slovak composer Ľubica Čekovská describes her piece »Toy Procession«, composed in 2025 out of a deep artistic connection with our guest conductor Juraj Valčuha. This study in movement is about a process of remembrance: the recapturing of childhood imagination and, with it, that light-hearted simplicity that is often lost in adulthood. It is composed as a wonderfully rhythmic arc in which figures are successively awakened, culminating in a frenetic parade. Fittingly, we pair this captivating music with two works born of young enthusiasm: Rachmaninoff began his First Piano Concerto in 1890 at the age of just 17 whilst studying in Moscow – and even in this refreshing Opus 1, his characteristic melodic qualities and lush melancholy are already evident. Lukáš Vondrácek takes on the solo part, which a fellow student of Rachmaninoff described as »stormy vigour«. Shostakovich was also a 17-year-old student when he was working on his first symphony in St Petersburg, which he later submitted as his final exam piece. The examination board immediately recognised an »expression of the highest talent«. But even more moving for the young composer must have been what the conductor of the world premiere, Nikolai Malko, said in 1926 about this astonishingly precocious flow of sound – for he spoke of the dawn of »a new chapter in the history of the symphony« and the discovery of »a new great composer«.