Mahler Chamber Orchestra olv. Teodor Currentzis

Last year, Andrej Baranov won the Queen Elizabeth Competition with an impassioned performance of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto. His energetic, yet refined playing of the exhausting cadenza made the whole audience gasp for breath. In deSingel, this passionate Russian will now be presenting the sequel: a much darker but equally intense concerto. It will be a real challenge for him to improve on last year's winning performance, but Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony is a veritable bomb. "Everything I have written up to now has been a preparation for this work", he once explained. This symphonic song cycle is a musical expression of his dismay at untimely death. With a total disregard for tradition. Conventionally, the theme of death would be softened with heavenly sounds suggesting eternal rest or a new beginning. But instead, Shostakovich rubs our noses in the irreversible horror of the end of life, with no hope of salvation. By turns macabre, enthralling and apocalyptic, his most radical music often sounds atonal and exceptionally inventively orchestrated. He dedicated the work to Benjamin Britten, who also features in the programme with 'Phaedra', a cantata from his final year of life. Rare, intriguing sound images loom up out of a pared-down orchestra that includes a harpsichord.