To open her series of Budapest concerts, she has selected the sole concerto work to be written by Sibelius: his masterful Violin Concerto in D minor. The Finnish composer dedicated the piece to the Hungarian wunderkind Ferenc Vecsey, who was 12 years old at the time. One of its movements - the third - is widely considered to be the finest ever written for a violin concerto. British musicologist likened it to a "polonaise for polar bears”, while others hear in it the terrible din of the battlefield. The highly technical and exhilaratingly original piece is being performed by Russian-born German violinist Alina Pogostkina.
"Most of my symphonies are tombstones,” said Shostakovich. The clamour of battle in his Symphony No. 7 is no mere figment of the imagination: it brings together the horrors of the siege of Leningrad, the atrocities wrought by dictators, the tears and pain and false nostalgia in a synthesis of gravity and character. The work's 1942 Leningrad première was a blood-curling affair. The emaciated musicians performing it were not much more than skin and bones, and the conductor had to fetch the percussionist from the morgue, where he had accidentally been taken while still alive. Nevertheless, the symphony was played. It was broadcast on the radio and echoed from the city's loudspeakers at full blast, so that the Germans could hear it too: Leningrad lived.

Presented by: Budapest Festival Orchestra