In this event, one of the Denizbank Concerts, the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lionel Bringuier, will first accompany volinist Daniel Lozakovich in Shostakovich’s four-movement Violin Concerto No 1 in A minor, Opus 77, written in 1947-48. As the composer had been denounced by the Soviet authorities in 1948, it could not be performed in the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death; it received its first performance in 1955. David Oistrakh, the concerto’s dedicatee, remarked on the ‘depth of its artistic content’.
In the second half, the orchestra will play Brahms’s four-movement Symphony No 1 in C minor, Opus 68, a work that it took the composer at least 14 years to write; Brahms himself said that it had taken him 21 years – from 1855 to 1876. Two reasons for the long delay in the work’s receiving its final shape may have been (firstly) that Brahms was an extremely self-critical man who destroyed many of his early works, and (secondly) that he was cowed by popular expectations that he would ‘continue Beethoven’s inheritance’, and Beethoven – Brahms’s idol – was a hard act to follow.
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
