Northern Chamber Orchestra

Mozart’s playful overture to his comic opera The Marriage of Figaro fizzes with energy. The bustling notes of its opening, like whispers of gossip and intrigue, capture the pace and the atmosphere of this work of social satire. With his music being denounced in a post-WWII crackdown in Soviet ideological correctness, did Shostakovich believe that his String Quartet No. 4 would ever be performed? Friends feared the dire political reaction the work would provoke, in particular due to its inclusion of Jewish motifs at the time of a Stalinist purge of Soviet Jews. Shostakovich’s friend, Rudolf Barshai, later arranged the quartet for small orchestra, a version that became known as the Chamber Symphony Op. 83a, sympathetically enhancing its many colours. We conclude this season with an audience favourite, Beethoven’s captivating Piano Concerto No. 4. From the piano’s opening chords, caressing the instrument and evoking an ethereal response from the orchestra, to a slow movement often characterised as Orpheus calming savage beasts, and to its vigorously joyful finale, there are delights at every turn