Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique

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Performers

Programme notes

Sayaka Shoji, who since winning the First Prize at the Paganini Competition in 1999 -she was the first Japanese violinist and the youngest artist to do so- has performed alongside the world’s leading conductors (Ashkenazy, Davis, Dutoit, Jansons, Maazel, Mehta and Pappano among others), playing music with the most prestigious orchestras. With the desire to fully explore the virtues of Shoji as a soloist, the Artistic Director of the Orchestra, Tomàs Grau, offers a re-reading of the Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, op. 61, a part that the composer dedicated to his colleague Franz Clement, a prominent violinist of his time, in 1806. In fact, the fate of this work is associated with well-known violinists of all times; this concert was played very little in Beethoven’s life and it was not until the mid-nineteenth century, and thanks to the performance of a youngest Joseph Joachim, that it became a very successful piece.

The second half of the concert showcases a well-liked composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, performed by the Orquestra Simfònica Camera Musicae, with which Grau closes the ‘Tchaikovsky cycle’, a composer who has undoubtedly marked the growth of the Catalan formation the last five years, and Grau does so by programming the Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Pathétique, the last symphonic work of the composer and an authentic treatise on destiny, and a recognized homage to Russian folklore.