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A concert that explores the ways personal and public tragedy was transformed into the invention of three pieces of 20th-century music.
It’s difficult to imagine the energy required to sustain an ovation for 40 minutes, but such a situation, apparently, met the first performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. Written in 1937, under the terror of arrest, it manipulates the insane intellectual challenge of survival amidst the brutal cultural control of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
It pushes ironic duality to its limits in such a way that whilst audiences respond to the blazing ingenuity of the music they still debate the clues embedded within: such as the secret, voiceless setting of Pushkin’s words, ‘With the passing of time, the crude daubings of the barbarian will dry and flake off like old scales. The beauty of the original painting will be visible once more.’
Before the interval Claudia Huckle joins the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ SSO to render a set of songs by Mahler whose words by Friedrich Rückert are lyrical responses to personal grief. These are pieces of deep psychological exploration which seem to reflect Mahler’s own experiences of bereavement in uncanny ways, uncovering music of great tenderness and beauty.
And the concert opens with a work of poignant simplicity which in spite of –or perhaps because of- its rather abstract, classical origins has been co-opted to many situation of public mourning: Barber’s Adagio, for strings.

Recorded at The Music Hall, Aberdeen

Presented by Jamie MacDougall

Barber: Adagio for strings
Mahler: Kindertotenlieder

8.20 Interval

8.40 Part 2

Shostakovich: Symphony no 5

Claudia Huckle (Contralto)
Michael Sanderling (conductor)
³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scottish Symphony Orchestra