In their first of two programmes at the George Enescu International Festival, Alain Altinoglu and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony paired Sibelius’ Violin Concerto with Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony. Composed forty years apart in very different circumstances, the works nonetheless formed an illuminating juxtaposition. The performances revealed them as related meditations on the 20th century’s darker ethos, marked by existential doubt and a search for direction.
In his interpretation of Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, Julian Rachlin underscored the work’s brooding, symphonic character rather than treating it as a virtuoso showpiece. His first entrance rose almost imperceptibly from the tremolo strings, introspective and subdued, setting the tone for an Allegro moderato in which torrents of scales and arpeggios, executed with clarity and brilliance, remained integrated into the orchestral fabric. Altinoglu drew incisive playing from the winds and weight from the lower strings, emphasising the austerity of the soundscape. Against it, the violin appeared less a commanding presence than a solitary voice estranged yet striving to blend into its surroundings – a figure not unlike one of Caspar David Friedrich’s wanderers, absorbed in the immensity before him.
The Adagio deepened that sense of contemplative solitude, its long arcs sustained with quiet inevitability rather than overt sentiment. In the finale, Rachlin resisted any lapse into flashy brilliance, while still bringing muscular rhythm and earthy vigor to the dance-like writing. Played as an encore with hushed intimacy, Bach’s Sarabande from the Partita in D minor, BWV 1004, represented a perfectly fitting meditative afterthought to Sibelius’ solitary expanses.
If Sibelius suggested a private struggle, Shostakovich addressed one of collective, historical proportions in his Eighth Symphony, composed in the aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad but representing far more than a triumphalist commemoration of the Soviet victory. Altinoglu approached the opening Adagio with patience, allowing the long string lines to accumulate weight and inevitability. Climaxes were searing, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony projecting tragic force with clarity. At the heart of the movement, Michael Höfele’s plaintive English horn solo emerged as a voice of solitary lament, answered by strings in tones of weary resignation. It was just one of the remarkable instrumental solos scattered through the symphony, from sarcastic trumpet calls to delicate piccolo arabesques to elegiac horn lines, all exquisitely rendered by the orchestra’s instrumentalists.
The second and third movements shifted from grief to aggression. The Allegretto had the air of a distorted march, its clipped rhythms and biting winds suggesting menace tinged with irony. The Allegro non troppo, propelled by relentless ostinati in percussion and brass, became a vision of mechanised violence, implacable in its drive. Altinoglu kept the pacing taut, allowing the cumulative energy to mount without ever tipping into exaggeration.
In the Passacaglia, layers of weight were gradually added until the texture grew almost unbearably dense. The strings sustained their long lines with discipline, while winds and brass darkened the sound. The movement’s arc felt less like a formal design than a collective process of grief brought to breaking point. The finale brought no consolation, only fragile persistence. Altinoglu let the hesitant woodwinds and muted strings speak with plain directness. What lingered was not resolution but bleak acceptance — music that bears witness rather than redeems.
