Altinoglu, Hagen & hr-Sinfonieorchester

Stravinsky's sparkling ballet music Petrushka and Shostakovich's 1st Cello Concerto with shooting star Julia Hagen are presented by the hr-Sinfonirochester with its chief conductor Alain Altinoglu.

At their first concert in the Brucknerhaus in 15 years, the hr-Sinfonieorchester with chief conductor Alain Altinoglu and cellist Julia Hagen juxtapose works by Dmitri Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky, in which exuberant cheerfulness and bitter seriousness lie close together: Shostakovich wrote his 1st Cello Concerto in 1959 for his close friend, the 'super-virtuoso' Mstislav Rostropovich. Not only does a variant of the characteristic DSCH motif at the beginning of the work make the composition a real musical calling card for Shostakovich, the solo concerto is also characterized by biting exuberance and deep emotionality. This contrasts with Stravinsky's 'colorful' music for Sergei Dyagilev's ballet Petrushka, composed almost 50 years earlier, for which he was inspired by popular puppet theater: A sonorous, all-too-human game of desire, seduction and jealousy unfolds between three puppets belonging to a juggler at a fair in St. Petersburg, ultimately involving life and death, while the boundaries between reality and fiction become blurred.