大象传媒

The Ulster Orchestra are joined by their Artistic Director, conductor Rafael Payare, for this concert of music by Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovich. Soprano Dorothea R枚schmann will open the concert with Strauss's Four Last Songs, written towards the end of the composer's life when he was aged 84, and published after his death in 1949 by his friend Ernst Roth. The work can be said in many ways to be a reflection of Strauss's own life - the work is for solo soprano and orchestra and contains prominent sections for the horn; Strauss's father Franz was a professional horn player and his wife, Pauline de Ahna, a soprano.

Three of the poems which Strauss set to music are around the subject of death, indeed in his setting of "Im Abendrot" he actually quotes a passage from his earlier work "Death and Transfiguration", the so-called "transfiguration theme".

Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4 in C minor, although written between 1935-36, wouldn't actually receive its premiere for another 25 years, eventually being performed by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in December 1961 under conductor Kirill Kondrashin. During the piece's composition, Shostakovich was coming under increased scrutiny and criticism from Stalin, who ordered a scathing piece to be written, denouncing the composer in the communist publication 'Pravda.' This may have been the reason Shostakovich decided to withdraw the work for its planned performance in Leningrad in December 1936. When asked by colleagues about the article, the composer replied, "I don鈥檛 write for Pravda, I write for myself."

The orchestra in the symphony is enormous, boasting 4 flutes and 2 piccolos, 5 clarinets and 8 horns alongside 2 harps and a vast percussion section.