Cover des Programmheftes
Programme brochure

for the concert

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Programme

Zoltán Kodály
›Dances from Galánta‹

Franz Liszt
›Totentanz‹ (Dance of the Dead) for piano and orchestra

Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 5 in D minor

Artists

Tarmo Peltokoski Conductor

  • Martin Helmchen Piano

Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

Kerem Hasan unfortunately had to cancel his participation in the concert on 3 October due to illness. We are very pleased that Tarmo Peltokoski has agreed to take over the conducting at short notice. Missy Mazzoli's 'River Rouge Transfiguration' will be omitted, and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony will be performed instead of the suite from 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk'. The rest of the programme remains unchanged.

About the concert

A strong local reference characterises Zoltán Kodály’s ‘Dances from Galánta’. During the Hungarian composer’s childhood, his father worked for seven years as a railway employee in the town lending its name to the title, which lies on the route between Budapest and Bratislava. In his youth, Kodály heard wandering bands playing music in the style of the Verbunkos here. The term, derived from the German word “Werben”, meaning to recruit, originally referred to a dance used to recruit soldiers. However, this meaning was abandoned in musical folklore, which Kodály merged in the composition with his very own style.

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Many musicians such as Berlioz, Rachmaninoff and Saint-Saëns were fascinated by the “Dies irae” sequence of notes handed down from the Middle Ages. Franz Liszt used this motif as the basis for his ‘Totentanz’ (‘Dance of the Dead’) for piano and orchestra. In the course of the variations following after, the theme, hammered out by the solo instrument in an almost percussive manner at the beginning, becomes the subject of a canon and a passage to which the horns lend the atmosphere of a hunting scene. Martin Helmchen, who received a Gramophone Award in 2020 with the DSO for the joint recording of Beethoven’s Second and Fifth Piano Concertos, takes on the eminently virtuoso solo part.

The opera ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’ by Dmitri Shostakovich, which was acclaimed at its first performances and from which an orchestral suite is played at the end of the concert, was banned in 1936, presumably on Stalin’s personal instructions. The music to the plot about patriarchal oppression, violent revenge and erotic addiction reflects the archaic brutality of the Stalin era in a perhaps unique way.

Cover des Programmheftes
Programme brochure

for the concert

Download PDF

Artists

Tarmo Peltokoski

Tarmo Peltokoski

Conductor

Martin Helmchen

Martin Helmchen

Piano

Biography
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

Orchestra

Biography