Die große Reihe – Staunen

Symphony concert by the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra in the Liederhalle

BIZET | Carmen Suite No. 2
MOZART | Piano Concerto in C major KV 467
SCHOSTAKOWITSCH | Symphony No. 5

Marianna Shirinyan, piano
Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Andrey Boreyko

(DIS)DECEPTION

In the plot of George Bizet's opera "Carmen" (1875), we marvel at how the proud sergeant Don José succumbs hopelessly to the erotic attraction of Carmen, a worker in a cigarette factory, forgets his soldierly duties and his "moral compass", and finally stabs her out of jealousy and disappointment. Bizet has ingeniously translated the strong emotions and the Spanish local color into music that grabs its audience from the very first note.

Between 1784 and 1786, Mozart composed no fewer than 12 piano concertos. He wrote most of them for "academies" he himself organized during Advent and Carnival (the two concert seasons in Vienna). The scope of the works, the orchestration, the pianistic demands and the complexity of the music are surprisingly different each time. The Piano Concerto K. 467 was completed on March 9, 1785 and premiered the very next day at the Burgtheater in Vienna with Mozart as the soloist. At the beginning of 1936, following a visit by Stalin to Dmitri Shostakovich's new opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk", an article appeared in the newspaper Pravda with the headline "Chaos instead of music", on the basis of which the work was condemned and banned. The composer feared for his life. He learned that his sister's husband had been arrested and that she herself had been deported to Siberia. Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony before it was published and began composing a Fifth in April 1937, which he described as "a Soviet artist's practical response to just criticism". The premiere of the Fifth was acclaimed and Shostakovich seemed to have been rehabilitated. It is disputed whether the triumphant finale of the symphony represents an optimistic solution or a caricature of the circumstances. He himself is said to have said: "Waiting for execution is one of the themes that have tormented me all my life, many pages of my music speak of it."