September 14, 2024 | Tchaikovsky Concert Hall
Soloist – Dmitry Shishkin (piano)
Conductor – Arsenty Tkachenko
Mozart. Concerto No. 20 for piano and orchestra in D minor, KV 466
Brahms. Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68
The National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia is opening its concert season at the Moscow Philharmonic Society with a program of works by Austro-German classics – Mozart and Brahms. Arsenty Tkachenko, the prizewinner of international competitions, second conductor of the NPR, now also leading the Novosibirsk Chamber Orchestra, will direct the program.
The concert will feature pianist Dmitry Shishkin, Silver Prize winner at the 16th edition of the Tchaikovsky International Competition. The pianist gave his first concert at the age of three years and at present has got behind him a good number of wins and performances at the most esteemed competitions and stages from the Mariinsky Theater to the Wiener Konzerthaus. Boris Bloch, the professor of the Essen Music Academy, describes his playing in such words: 'Shishkin’s charm is primarily in his performing individuality. It is transmitted in all aspects of his playing: in the sound and its colours, in handling the pedal bringing out even more colours and at the same time transparency, in its natural phrasing, in its rubato – light and poetic.'
The night will start with Mozart's Concerto No. 20 for piano and orchestra. It is the first of the two piano concertos in a minor key by the Viennese classic written in 1785 for his own performances in famous Vienna Academies. As Mozart's other D minor works (“the key of death” was used by him for the Requiem and the beginning and the end of the Don Giovanni opera and some other opuses), the Concerto No. 20 belongs to the most dramatic pages of his art. The Concerto was much loved by Beethoven who wrote his own cadenza to it (the author's cadenza had not been written but improvised by him during the first performance according to the practice of those times).
In Part 2 of the concert the NPR will play Brahms's First Symphony under the baton of Arsenty Tkachenko. Originally the Symphony had been inspired by Byron's Manfred. It required almost 15 years from the composer to write the First Symphony in its final form. The author was already 43 years old. The composition followed Beethoven's traditions written like a symphonic drama all movements of which are united by a single poetic idea. The framing movements bear the conflict, which must be dissolved whereas the internal movements play the roles of lyrical and conversation pieces bringing some relaxation.
One of the themes in the Symphony (the theme in the Finale variations) reminds of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which permitted Hans von Bulow to define Brahms's First Symphony as Beethoven's Tenth. On the other side, Brahms himself highly praised the heritage of the other Viennese classic: he owned the manuscript of Mozart's glorious 40th Symphony and at the 100th anniversary of the Salzburg genius played the piano part in his Concerto No. 20 in Hamburg.