Bartok | Brahms with the soloist Josef Špaček by Brahms, Bartók, Nuo (2022/2022), Dirigentas Martijn Dendievel

With the second violin concerto, composed between 1937 and 1939, shortly before his emigration to the USA, Béla Bartók created one of his most popular solo concertos. He wrote it on behalf of the soloist Zoltán Székely. Bartók actually had a set of variations in mind. Székely wanted a classic shape. The composer masterfully managed to combine the two. Within the arrangement with a sonata, a variation movement and a rondo finale, he developed a diverse and contrasting musical texture from a limited basic material: Singing melody and sharp harmonies, dance-like verve and nervous rhythms, romantic indulgence and hard breaks come together to form a whole. With Josef Špaček, an outstanding young violinist has been won for the concert. Even as a school child, Johannes Brahms was keen to learn to play the piano and remained connected to this instrument throughout his life. Not only did he regularly perform as an interpreter, there were also countless works with piano participation from his pen. The Piano Quartet in G minor was composed in the late 1850s. Brahms thus created a composition that, when it was first performed in 1861, went far beyond what contemporary audiences understood by the term “chamber music” in terms of scope and type of instrumentation. In this symphony concert, it sounds in an instrumentation by the Brahms admirer Arnold Schönberg, who formulated his motives for it concisely and clearly: “1. i like the piece 2. It is rarely played. 3. It is always played very badly, because the better the pianist, the louder you play, and you don't hear anything from the strings. I wanted to hear everything once, and I achieved that.” In this symphony concert, the Belgian conductor Martijn Dendievel makes his debut in Chemnitz. He is currently Associate Conductor at the Symfonieorkest Vlaanderen and winner of the German Conductor Prize 2021. In the same year he won the first Conductors' Academy of the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich and was also a finalist in the Donatella Flick Competition of the London Symphony Orchestra.