Shostakovich tonight at the Performing Arts Center

Reading Symphony Orchestra
Date: Saturday Apr 12, 2008
Time: 08:00 pm
Venue: Sovereign Performing Arts Center
Price - Range $60.00 - $17.00
Tickets Available by Clicking Here




Shostakovich at the Beginning
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Sovereign Performing Arts Center

Brahms
Tragic Overture

Bartók
Viola Concerto
Roberto Diaz, soloist

Shostakovich
Symphony No. 1

Brahms’ Tragic Overture doesn’t follow a particular programmatic theme; Brahms named this 1880 work the “Tragic” to differentiate it from his far merrier “Academic Festival” Overture, composed about the same time. It’s one of Brahms’ most dramatic short works, and a welcome return to our stage. We also welcome the return of Roberto Diaz to the RSO, in what promises to be a memorable interpretation of Bartok’s Viola Concerto. Bartok wrote this concerto in 1945, while suffering from the last stages of leukemia. Sadly, he did not live to see it performed; William Primrose, principal viola of the Philadelphia Orchestra, gave the first performance in 1949. We conclude the season with an astonishing student composition, Shostakovich’s remarkable First Symphony. This 1925 work (written when Shostakovich was just 19) created an instant international reputation for the composer; it contains much of the wit of the Prokofiev “Classical” Symphony, while also displaying a sense of foreboding about what would become a haunted career, plagued by tyrannical purges, devastating war, and decades of repression