Beethoven 5 & Gerstein plays Bartók

“THUS FATE KNOCKS AT THE DOOR” 

First guest conductor Roberto González-Monjas begins this concert with a work by Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi. Ascent - Concerto for Orchestra is a seven-movement composition that gradually rises from an oceanic basin to a beautiful starry sky.

Fleeing World War II, Hungarian composer Béla Bartók spent the last years of his life in America. Initially, he did not find it easy to settle there. Besides homesickness, illness and a desperate lack of money also played tricks on him. However, his situation improved considerably in 1943, when he was commissioned to write the Concerto for Orchestra, which later became famous. By 1945, he was feeling so well that he conceived the plan to write a piano concerto - his third one - for the birthday of his second wife, Ditta Pásztory. However, this light and airy work, almost neoclassical in nature, fell just short of completion: Bartók died 17 bars before the end of the score and one month before his wife's birthday.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is perhaps the most famous work in the history of classical music. He described the highly rhythmic opening motif - three short notes and a longer one - with the words “thus fate knocks at the door!” Unlike the Greeks, however, people of the Enlightenment era did not see fate as a force to which they blindly submitted. In four movements, Beethoven thus forges a path from darkness (the opening movement in C minor) to the light (the final movement in C major). “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage,” the German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said. The sinister notes of destiny in the first movement undergo various metamorphoses and ultimately return in the fourth movement in a bright, triumphant march.

Roberto González-Monjas, conductor
Kirill Gerstein, piano

© Photo by Marco Borggreve