in cooperation with BERLIN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
Elgar & Tchaikovsky with
Zubin Mehta &
Pinchas Zukerman
Secretive Thoughts, Secretive Art - Music as Autobiography’
Programme
Edward Elgar
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in B minor, op. 61 (53 min.)
Pinchas Zukerman Violin
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, op. 64 (54 min.)
Goethe-Institut invites the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to its auditorium in a digital format with high definition video live-streaming for the connoisseurs of Western classical music of Chennai. The Digital Concert Hall with excellent sound and video is the best close-to-real experience one can get.
Two world stars, conductor
Zubin Mehta, a long-standing friend and artistic companion of the Berliner Philharmoniker and soloist
Pinchas Zukerman, one of the greatest violin virtuosos of our time come together to present ‘Secretive Thoughts, Secretive Art - Elgar and Tchaikovsky: Music as Autobiography’
This highly expressive concert features Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto, which is characterised by its at once emotional and modern tonal language and Tchaikovsky’s late-Romantically agitated Fifth Symphony.
‘But I love it’: Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto
Without a doubt, the ca. 50-minute composition is built on the musical foundations of the late Romantic era and boasts an ideal balance between solo instrument and orchestra. With great élan and vigour Elgar once again revives all those compositional traditions that were definitively laid to rest with the outbreak of the First World War. The vocally inspired melodic ideas are tinged with melancholy and longing. Elgar’s music may seem almost anachronistic. But such an assessment of this nostalgic late flowering of the cult of beauty in no way detracts from the score’s indisputable mastery. Elgar himself is said to have been very satisfied with this work: ‘It’s good!’ he is quoted as saying, ‘Awfully emotional – too emotional! But I love it!’
‘The Fatal Power’: Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony
Tchaikovsky’s Fifth suggests a composer’s ‘confession of the soul’, yet it took him a long time to come to terms with his creation. Only after the work began to take off as an international triumph, the composer was reconciled with his own music. Tchaikovsky lacked the power of self-assertion, instead believing in the inevitability of destiny, ‘the fatal power which prevents one from attaining the goal of happiness’. Only in music could Tchaikovsky give vent to his most secret thoughts and hardships, and it was precisely this situation that gave rise to the radically subjective nature of his art. One encounters this theme of fate in all four movements, but in the course of the symphony it undergoes astonishing metamorphoses. Tchaikovsky has blatantly used the theme of fate, a tried-and-tested formula from music history – to turn from tragedy to affirmation and to move from darkness ‘into the light’.
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