Lahav Shani, the IPO’s Music Director Designate, returns to play with and conduct the orchestra, along with Leonidas Kavakos, one of the world's leading violinists, in a particularly varied program.

Out of the Dark by Daniel Shalit

The work is based on a Chabad melody, a melody of yearning for redemption, a melody of introverted solitude without words, that was sketched by the composer as he heard it from the mouth of the late Rabbi Eliah Rivkin. Rabbi Eliah kept dozens of old Chabad tunes in his memory. He survived the Holocaust when he was sent to study in a Yeshiva in England, and these melodies were saved along with him.

The theme is a wonderful, primal melody. Four variations develop around the two-part theme. First variation: Night, with memories of the past. Second variation: wandering and screaming. Third variation: comfort and hope. Fourth variation: Songs of hope amid the background of the difficult present.

The work was recorded this year with the London Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Simca Heled.

Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra by Shostakovich

Opus numbers have always been a complicated issue. In many cases it was not the composers who noted the numbers of their works and the order in which they were written, and debates about the accuracy of the lists by Ludwig von Köchel (Mozart), Otto Erich Deutsch (Schubert) and John Kirkpatrick (Ives). In the realm of opus numbers, the first violin concerto of Shostakovich, which the composer himself gave two opus numbers (77 and 99), is striking.

The story of the two opuses of this concerto opens yet another glimpse into the nightmare in which Dmitry Shostakovich worked for many years.

In February 1948, Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's abhorred Secretary of Culture, issued a scathing statement aimed at Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and several other composers, accusing them of "formalism," the harshest condemnation that the Soviet regime used to accuse dissenters. (Zhdanov himself died about six months after the publication of this announcement.) Only five years later, with the death of Stalin, the cloud over the heads of the Soviet musicians was somewhat lifted. When the announcement of the condemnation was published, Shostakovich was in the process of composing the Violin Concerto and gave the work the opus number 77, but he decided to put it aside and save the premiere for a more convenient period, which came with the death of Stalin. Shostakovich returned to the concerto in 1955, edited the score and made a few corrections. David Oistrakh performed the work at the premiere on October 29 in Leningrad (he, incidentally, elaborated on the difficulty this piece poses to the soloist and called the third movement "satanic"). And when it was published, around the time of the first performance, it was given an opus number reflecting its place on the continuum of Shostakovich's works (99). It was only in the last years of his life that the composer decided to attach the original opus to his concerto, allowing anyone who wanted to see the fate and life of a composer in Russia during the last century. This wide-ranging concerto (about 35 minutes) consists of four movements and shows Shostakovich's ability to write wonderful melodic music. Critics and violinists mention this concerto also because of the over-sized cadenza that connects the third and fourth movements.

Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz

There are few composers and few works that cast a shadow on artists as large as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The feeling that everything that can be said in the genre of the symphony has already been said in this work influenced the symphonic thought of many composers. Who would have believed that Brahms or Schumann or Schubert were terrified from a large symphony that had been written before them?

A crazy and “different” kind of man, like Berlioz, was needed to bring a new attitude to the symphonic genre. A composer that was not a wunderkind and did not play piano (Berlioz's instrument was guitar), someone who learned medicine at the command of his father, who was a doctor and atheist (unlike his mother who was a strict catholic). These were the circumstances necessary to write this work in his twenties, which broke all the borders that existed until then. It was written for a monstrous orchestra in terms of the period of composition (Two tubas? Who heard of such a thing before this?) It came with an extra-musical narrative, with explicit hints appearing within the score, a story that includes, among other things, the image of the sensitive artist and of different and rather disturbed visions that he experienced. This is a work that has meticulous thematic elements and is almost a "school for orchestration." A work that went beyond the boundaries of the symphonic genre as designed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and preceded Wagner, the symphonic poems of Liszt and Strauss, and Mahler's extensive symphonic writing. And to think that all this happened less than four years after Beethoven's death!

Get to know the man (Berlioz) and his world with a few quotes:

1. "Time is a wonderful teacher, and unfortunately it kills his students." (From a letter, November 1856)
2. "A life in which you have not read Hamlet at least once is like living in a coal mine."
3. "This man was dead all his life..."
4. "Hot topics should be treated in cold blood..."