November 22, 2013
Christ Church, Malvern
Violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen
Kenneth Woods– conductor
Tchaikovsky- Andante Cantabile (arr. 1st Quartet)
Shostakovich- Chamber Symphony opus 83a (arr. 4th Quartet)
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Tchaikovsky- Violin Concerto
Tamsin Waley-Cohen– violin
Our 2013 Christ Church Season comes to a thrilling conclusion with an evening of Russian masterworks and a guest appearance from on of Britain’s most talented and charismatic violinists. Tchaikovsky’s widely-loved Violin Concerto is a work full of optimism, passion and high spirits, from the epic first movement, to the humorous and staggeringly virtuosic finale. With its endless abundance of melody and thrilling violin writing, it’s hard to imagine how much trouble it gave its creator. The Concerto was conceived and composed in a period of profound personal crisis, just after Tchaikovsky’s disastrously failed marriage in 1878, and after it was completed, Tchaikovsky suffered seemingly endless setbacks in trying to get the work performed, with its dedicatee calling it “unplayable” and later making myriad unwarranted cuts and changes. Such a difficult birth is hard to fathom for those of us who know it as one of the most beloved works in the repertoire. Like Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich excelled in an usual breadth of musical genres, and always seemed able to tap into the spirit of folk music. In fact, his Fourth String Quartet was composed “for the drawer” with no possibility of immediate performance during the Stalinist repression of the post-WW II Soviet Union. A generation later, Shostakovich’s friend and student Rudolf Barshai orchestrated the work as the Chamber Symphony opus 83a- it’s a communicative and moving masterpiece that ranges from spooky stasis to tragic grandeur.