The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under its chief conductor Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla presented a good two and a half hour long, not easy program to the subscription audience on Thursday. Nevertheless, we managed to keep the tension and fascinate until the last minute.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who, with 21 completed works, is one of the great symphonists of the 20th century, has an adventurous biography marked by flight, oppression, constant fear for life and artistic limitations. Similar to the situation of his mentor and friend Dmitri Shostakovich, who navigated the unpredictable cliffs of a totalitarian regime and created amazing inner spaces for himself. This is also the case in his second cello concerto, which revels in a nostalgic mood.
Julia Hagen was the ideal interpreter, who wonderfully transformed the technically challenging solo part into sound and emotion and evoked that gloomy atmosphere that also shows the facets of human warmth. A work that is unbelievably difficult to realize – also for the orchestra – but this time it was completely convincing. This was not only due to Julia Hagen’s outstanding musicality, but also to Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla’s precise conducting, which on the outside seemed very concentrated and level-headed, but on the inside emotionally overflowing. She has that fascinating gift of allowing a volcano of sound development to erupt with just a few small signs, without falling into physical ecstasy herself. She remains the calm pole that controls the processes with pinpoint accuracy.
Also in Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 3rd and 4th symphony – played intensively, technically brilliantly and tonally perfectly balanced. The prelude was just as idiosyncratic – with Julia Hagen and six of the 24 preludes for cello, in which Weinberg plays with musical quotations, and with Shostakovich’s first cello concerto. (wuss)
Source: Nachrichten
