ConcertPulse
Symphoniker Hamburg / Adrian Iliescu / Nil Venditti
Laeiszhalle, Großer Saal (Hamburg)
The Symphoniker Hamburg’s second VielHarmonie concert will live up to its name, as there will be plenty of harmony to discover. When the composer Caroline Shaw was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013, she was not only one of only a few women, but also the youngest ever winner at the age of just 30. She originally wrote her »Entr’acte« for quartet as a witty reaction to hearing Haydn’s last completed quartet, but in 2014 she adapted the work for string orchestra in the version heard in this concert. William Walton’s Violin Concerto was premiered in December 1939 by Jascha Heifetz, who had commissioned the work and to whom it is dedicated. The English composer then revised it in 1944. The concerto opens with the slowest movement, the first theme of which is labelled »sognando« (dreaming). In the second movement, presto, a tarantella tells of an experience Walton had while composing in 1938, when he was actually bitten by a tarantula in Ravello, Italy. He himself smilingly calls this passage »rather gaga, I can say, and of dubious decency«. The rondo finale finally brings romantic-expressive expressiveness and brilliant virtuosity to a climax.