Name: Shostakovich's retreat
Start: 2024-03-01T19:00:00
Location: Alte Oper

Alexander Malofeev

Alain Altinoglu

hr-Sinfonieorchester

"Shostakovich requires powerful, sharp, cutting playing," says hr chief conductor Alain Altinoglu. And you have to dare to "go to the limits of instrumental possibilities." With the Fourth Symphony, he is now also exploring the limits of what is possible in terms of orchestra size. Dmitri Shostakovich conceived his "Fourth" as "a monumental matter of great thoughts and great passions." The orchestral means are accordingly maximal in all parameters, the composer goes all out. And yet it has become a work of retreat, of immigration, because Shostakovich's life hung by a thread during these years of the Stalinist Soviet dictatorship. A symphony so charged to extremes, with which Alain Altinoglu continues his Shostakovich series, can only be accompanied by a work of quasi-balancing exuberance - the best would be Sergei Rachmaninov's "Paganini Rhapsody", played by the same pianist who also opened the previous season with Rachmaninov. And who "came in as a stand-in", as the FR put it - with some effect: "The audience went a little crazy with enthusiasm."