Conductor Stanislav Kochanovsky leads DR Symfoniorkestret on a journey from darkness towards light in a programme centred on grief, resilience and personal reckoning.
The concert opens with Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings — a work of aching longing and defiant spirit that Americans have turned to in moments of national tragedy, including in the aftermath of 9/11.
DR Symfoniorkestret's own principal cellist Soo-Kyung Hong is the soloist in Donghoon Shin's cello concerto Nachtergebung, which had its world premiere at the Berlin Philharmonie in 2022. Inspired by the poetry of Georg Trakl, the work portrays the human soul's struggle against the cruelty and mania of modernity.
The evening culminates in Shostakovich's final symphony — an autobiographical work composed from his hospital bed, drawing together the threads of one of the twentieth century's great creative lives and tracing its own path through trauma and sorrow towards possible consolation.