Lahav Shani plays and conducts: Shostakovich, Richard Strauss and Dukas

Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducts Mozart and Shostakovich

There are some instruments that are particularly good at touching the innermost – among them is the clarinet. As early as 1784, a journalist raved: »Whoever plays the clarinet soulfully seems to declare his love to the whole world, to the heavenly beings themselves«. Mozart had quickly understood that gripping music was possible with the then newly invented woodwind instrument – and so in 1791, shortly before his untimely death, he composed his famous Clarinet Concerto. Especially in the Adagio, the chanting tone becomes fully effective: in a magical way, the clarinet »sings« of love, joy, beauty and perhaps even of the premonition of the end of life – the dedicatee Anton Stadler is said to have remarked: »Let him sing once more, even if it be his swan song«. Before our solo clarinettist Christoph Müller takes over the soulful performance for this hauntingly beautiful work, we play a piece from the Finnish homeland of our guest conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste: »Hit & Run« was penned by Sauli Zinovjev, born in 1988, who is causing a stir with his emotional orchestral works and was recently a guest in Bamberg for a year on a Villa Concordia scholarship. We conclude with a journey into the cosmos of Shostakovich, who also wanted to reflect current feelings and thoughts with his music – and said: »When I learn that someone is being tortured, I feel the pain myself.« We play his touching Eighth Symphony, with which he did not deliver the heroic work his fatherland wanted in the middle of the war in 1943, but cast the suffering of his soul in mostly gloomy sounds – a conductor friend said that Shostakovich thereby set »the horror of the life of an intellectual at that time« into music.