“When Zukerman is on stage, the audience doesn’t breathe…”

Pinchas Zukerman, one of the greatest living legends of classical music with a career spanning over four decades, garners the admiration of both audiences and critics alike as a violinist, violist, conductor, professor and chamber musician.

In the long-awaited joint performance with the Belgrade Philharmonic, Zukerman performs in a double role – as artistic leader and soloist. We open the concert with Elgar’s Serenade Op. 20, Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 follows, and we conclude the evening with Dvořák’s famous Symphony no. 8 in G major.

Tickets are priced at 2500, 3000, 3500 and 4000 RSD. Sales start October 6, at the MTS Concert Hall ticket office and website.

The British composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was himself a player – a violinist of enviable abilities, so it is not surprising that the works intended for this instrument are some of the composer’s most successful and personal achievements. Two compositions for string orchestra are also among general repertoire favorites, and at tonight’s concert we present Serenade Op. 20, one of the first works to establish Elgar as an author.

The work is stylistically characteristic of the composer’s artistic expression – the opening movement with the label pleasant, brings a corresponding atmosphere, which is achieved with skillful and delicate phrasing. The central movement represents a concise emotional expression before recalling the opening phrase, while the final brings a return to the character of the first, with discrete associations to its rhythmic structure.

The Serenade premiered in 1896 in Antwerp, and many years later Elgar singled it out as his favorite work, including it in some of the last gramophone recordings made just before the composer’s death.

The last in a series of five violin concertos by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), written in 1775 for Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg Hieronymus von Colloredo, belongs to perennial favorites dedicated to this instrument. Concerto for violin and orchestra no. 5, K 219, is written in A major, and follows the fast-light-fast movement structure typical of the period. In the final rondo, with a main theme characteristic of Mozart’s creative expression, the contrasting sections contain passages with overtones of Turkish music — which is why the work is now also known as The Turkish Concert.

Although Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) spent the most significant part of his career in the USA, where he wrote his masterpieces — Symphony No. 9 (From the New World), String Quartet Op. 96 (American) and the Cello Concerto No. 2 — his career in his homeland was already on the upswing a decade earlier. He was considered the leading Czech composer of his generation, and in the 1880s he began to break into the international music scene. After the popular Brahmsian Seventh Symphony, in 1889 Dvořák began work on the Eighth Symphony, which was originally considered his fourth symphonic work, as it was the fourth in print. This symphony represented the peak of Dvořák’s Czech creative period, being simultaneously the last one he wrote before leaving for New York.

Unlike the Seventh and Ninth, Symphony No. 8 is reminiscent of the optimistic Second Symphony by Brahms in its atmosphere. The composer conducted the premiere in the Rudolfinum in Prague in 1890, while the London premiere followed a few months later. Both performances brought undivided opinions of the audience and reviews of outstanding success.

The arrangement of movements in the sonata cycle of this symphony refers to the Fourth Symphony of Johannes Brahms, while certain compositional procedures go back even further into the past. The first movement in strict sonata form with a pastoral first theme and a chorale transition from one theme to another, is in the strong Beethoven tradition, just like the funeral march in the place of the second movement, the Scherzo with a Trio in the place of the third movement in the rhythm of the waltz and fanfare trumpets that begin the Finale. After the inner minor movements (with endings in major), the finale returns to the major tonality, and the composer applies the variation technique with the thematic materials of the first and second movements. The length of each variation depends on the nature of the development material, and at the very end the symphony is rounded off by a variational treatment of the opening theme of the first movement.

Asja Radonjic, M.Sc.