Krzysztof Urbański / Karen Gomyo

We begin the programme, conducted by Krzysztof Urbański, with a piece that begins as a moving lament: Penderecki’s »Threnos« is dedicated to the victims of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Here, 52 string instruments create an aura of unease using extreme playing techniques. When this haunting work was premiered at the Warsaw Autumn festival in 1961, a critic described it as a »deeply harrowing piece of seemingly hopeless apocalyptic mood«. We continue with Karen Gomyo as soloist in Alexander Glazunov’s passionate Violin Concerto – of whom the influential Russian art critic Vladimir Stasov remarked that he was »born in 1865 as a musical primal force«. His popular piece captivates with both its somber melodies and its spectacular fireworks of sound. The programme concludes with a symphony by Brahms, who sought to continue what he believed to be Beethoven’s musical legacy – considering this path, however, to be a »matter of life and death«. The conductor Hans von Bülow went on to describe his first symphony, completed in 1876, as »Beethoven's Tenth«. Following this liberating recognition, Brahms captured the atmosphere of a summer holiday in his follow-up work a year later. Yet the idyll is at times deceptive, and he even called the Second Symphony his »new, lovely monster«. Something was clearly troubling him at that time: he wrote to his publisher Fritz Simrock that he had never composed »anything so sad, so minor-key« – and to a friend he remarked: »You’ve never heard anything more world-weary.«