Kochanovsky & Sjostakovitj

The DR Symfoniorkester’s principal cellist Soo-Kyung Hong takes the leading role as soloist when the conductor Stanislav Kochanovsky leads the orchestra on a moving journey from the darkness of night towards the light. The concert opens with Barber’s famous Adagio and culminates in Sjostakovitj’s last and most personal symphony. Grief plays a central role in this special concert, which begins with the American composer Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings – a work whose painful longing and yet defiant spirit America has turned to in its darkest hours, including after 9/11. The DR Symfoniorkester’s own principal cellist Soo-Kyong Hong is the soloist in the South Korean composer Donghoon Shin’s cello concerto Nachtergebung. The work, which had its world premiere in 2022 at the Berliner Filharmornien, draws its inspiration from the poetry of Georg Trakl and depicts the struggle of the human soul against the mania and cruelty of modernity. Sjostakovitj explored the darkness of his own soul in his last symphony – an autobiographical work, created from his hospital bed, which seeks to tie together the threads of one of the great creative lives of the twentieth century. In the end the symphony follows its own journey through trauma and grief towards possible consolation. A concert that may, for a while, ease the unrest of the world and bring peace.

• Stanislav KochanovskyDirigent Soo-Kyung Hong, Cello

LISTEN TO MUSIC FROM THE CONCERT