Verzweigungen

Avant garde | Multi-layered | Revolutionary

The third season-ticket concert is a brief journey through the history of music, under the aegis of young conductor Jascha von der Goltz. The featured composers – Beethoven, Shostakovich and Ligeti – are from three entirely different eras. The concert opens with «Ramifications» from avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti. The string orchestra is divided into two groups with different tuning, as Ligeti breaks with classical conventions.

Shostakovich’s first cello concerto is part of his musical coming to terms with the Stalin regime and is marked by a sense of irony. Nowadays, the concerto is one of the most popular works for solo cello and could almost have been written for Alban Gerhardt, who has been delighting audiences for almost four decades with his brilliant technical abilities and his expressive musicality.

The evening concludes back in the classical era with Ludwig van Beethoven’s fourth symphony, which seems to capture the composer’s sensitivity more than his other works. Despite the sombre adagio to open it, the symphony is bright, approachable and idyllic in nature.