The sensational young Korean violinist Clara Jumi-Kang makes her debut with the National Symphony Orchestra as conductor Anja Bihlmaier returns for thrilling displays of light and shade by Mendelssohn and Schumann - watch live from 7.30 pm on Friday, April 8th - get your programme here.
Mendelssohn's last, large-scale work for orchestra, the E minor Violin Concerto, was also one of his greatest creations: a heart-on-sleeve masterpiece that treats solo instrument and orchestra as equals to produce one of the 19th century’s greatest concertos.
Shot through with Mendelssohn’s signature lyrical lightness of touch, its sweet song-like directness has an operatic intensity about it, the fleet, quicksilver finale a dazzlingly choreographed duet between violin and orchestra.
Begun in 1845, the year Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto was first performed, the premiere of Schumann’s Second Symphony was conducted by Mendelssohn in 1846. Composed in the aftermath of Schumann’s year-long nervous breakdown, it is cut from a very different cloth. A journey into the interior, it is a work of remarkable and affecting honesty, private despair giving way to new-found courage and determination in a closing statement of immense power.
A one-time pupil of Shostakovich and a cult figure in her native Russia before her belated discovery in the West in the 1990s, Galina Ustvolskaya’s distinctive voice earned her the nickname "the lady with the hammer". Her 1959 Suite for Orchestra is a work of startling energy and animation, cartoon-like in places, grotesque in others, driven along by a muscular rhythmic verve and laced with the gentlest of melodies.
Programme
Galina Ustvolskaya - Suite for Orchestra
Mendelssohn - Violin Concerto
Schumann - Symphony no. 2
National Symphony Orchestra with Anja Bihlmaier, conductor and Clara Jumi-Kang, violin
Presented by Paul Herriott, RTÉ lyric fm
