Lorin Maazel (15.09.2013 - Live - Lucerne) MP3

Vienna Philharmonic | Lorin Maazel | Martin Grubinger
Sun, 15 September 2013 | 19.30 | KKL Luzern, Concert Hall | 655
Martin Grubinger (Michael Herdlein)

Vienna Philharmonic | Lorin Maazel conductor | Martin Grubinger percussion
Friedrich Cerha (*1926)
Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47

“It is a game that may end very badly.” This open threat, which appeared in 1936 in the Soviet newspaper Pravda, stigmatized Dmitri Shostakovich. His music was described there as merely a decadent “clatter and rattle” and was condemned as noisy and neurotic. Shostakovich was well aware of what these words meant: from that point onward he lived in constant fear of death. Through his Fifth Symphony he attempted – according to the official version – to rebut these allegations, but decades later the true meaning of the “positive” finale was revealed: the euphoria of its pounding drums and trumpets was only forced: “It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘You have to rejoice, you have to rejoice!’” But there will be no compulsion when “artiste étoile” Martin Grubinger brings the evening to a brilliant conclusion with the drumming, pounding, and beating that Friedrich Cerha’s composition for him requires. This work, says Grubinger, “is the most musically valuable that we have in the repertoire. But it also contains the most difficult passages that I know…”
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