City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

Queen Elisabeth Hall

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PROGRAMMe

Mieczyslaw Weinberg

Symphony No. 4, Op. 61

Igor Stravinsky

Violin Concerto in D major, W61

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36

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The Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra since 2016, has made it her mission to draw attention to the music of the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996). A composer who, in the last decade of his life, wrote four chamber symphonies: personal reflections on himself and his contemporaries during the turbulent years of the Second World War and its aftermath. Weinberg's Symphony No. 4 is a rare masterpiece and was in its time already admired by colleague and competitor Dmitri Shostakovich.

The Moldovian star violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja then performs Igor Stravinsky's Violin Concerto in D. The names of the four movements - Toccata, Aria I, Aria II and Capriccio – refer to Bach's solo and double violin concertos (which were more to Stravinsky's taste than the violin concertos by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms). Intensely rhythmic and with a chamber music approach – in which the violin plays in duet with the different orchestral instruments – Stravinsky's violin concerto is not only a challenge for the soloist but indeed for the whole orchestra.

Tchaikovsky wrote his Symphony No. 4 during a particularly turbulent period in his life: a hasty marriage to a cello student in 1877 brought him to the brink of insanity. Yet in his work as a composer he was pushing back the frontiers: with his opera Jevgeni Onegin, with his violin concerto and also with his Symphony No. 4. Classical structures no longer sufficed to give expression to his inner life. Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 is also reminiscent of the symphonic poems of Franz Liszt. Life is a sequence of fleeting dreams that are dashed when they come up against harsh reality, relates Tchaikovsky in the first movement: We all float on the waves of an immense ocean of destiny that regularly immerses us in its depths.