Summer Strings

Dmitri Shostakovich Festive Overture
Camille Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No 1
Joseph Haydn Violin Concerto No 4
Pyotr I Tchaikovsky Fantasy Overture - Romeo and Juliet

Conductor Robert Guy
Soloists Emily Sharratt (violin)
and Stephanie Eustis (violoncello)

In the second of our Spotlight concerts, Robert Guy conducts two contrasting overtures. First up is Shostakovich's bright and celebratory Festive Overture composed in 1954 and a great way to start any concert, with fanfare and fizz! To close the evening, the romance and tragedy that is Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, a depiction in music of the action in Shakespeare's play suggested to the composer by Balakirev, his friend and fellow composer. Written in 1869, the love theme was reviewed in 1876 in Vienna as follows: "But this motive built on the alternation of two dissonant chords sounds rather like scratching a glass plate with a sharp knife."

Our two concertos provide a contrast too, with Haydn clearly of the classical period and Saint-Saëns firmly in the Romantic era. Haydn's many concertos, composed for violin, cello, flute, oboe, trumpet, horn, bassoon, piano and organ, were not all published during his lifetime, and many were lost in the two fires that destroyed his home in 1768 and 1776. So we should count ourselves lucky to hear this violin concerto tonight, a survivor of that bad luck. After Saint-Saëns completed this concerto he apparently vowed never to write another for the instrument, having found its technical means too restrictive. (Never say never again - he did write another 30 years later!) This concerto was first performed at the Paris Conservatory on January 19, 1873. Sir Donald Francis Tovey wrote of it: "Here, for once, is a violoncello concerto in which the solo instrument
displays every register throughout its compass without the slightest difficulty in penetrating the orchestral accompaniment." Praise indeed.