Susanna Mälkki - Conductor
Gil Shaham - Violin
PROGRAM
Jolas - A Little Summer Suite
Beethoven - Violin Concerto
INTERMISSION
Prokofiev - Symphony No. 5
Beethoven's only violin concerto is “an amazing trip,” says Gil Shaham, from the opening drumbeats, through some of “the most sublime, most beautiful violin passages ever,” to the “perfect fiddling” of the final dance. Susanna Mälkki, renowned interpreter of new music, leads Betsy Jolas's A Little Summer Suite, written in 2015 on the eve of the composer's 90th birthday. The deceptively simple opening of Prokofiev's rhapsodic Fifth Symphony gives way to a rich and complex display of his expansive talents, conceived, in the composer's words, as “a symphony of the greatness of the human spirit.”