Barry Douglas and Ulster Orchestra

Barry Douglas and Ulster Orchestra

Friday, 27 May 2022, 7.45pm

Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 Emperor
Walker Lyric for Strings
Shostakovich Symphony No. 9

Jamie Phillips Conductor
Barry Douglas Piano

Legendary International pianist Barry Douglas joins the Orchestra to perform Beethoven’s epic Emperor Piano Concerto.

The composer lays all his cards on the table with the grandest, most stirring piano concerto he ever wrote and Barry, whose recording of the Concerto with Camerata Ireland garnered widespread critical acclaim, is the perfect hands in which to entrust this performance.

George Walker’s Lyric for Strings started life as the second movement of a string quartet, before he extracted it, named it Lament and gave it the dedication ‘to my grandmother’, a formidable woman who had lost her first husband when he was sold as a slave and who had endured slavery herself. It later took the title Lyric for Strings, though he continued to refer to it as ‘my grandmother’s piece’; an elegy in her honour.

Shostakovich’s life and work was a perennial tightrope walk between writing the sort of work the Russian state expected from its composers and his own personal responses to his experiences in 1945, as the Soviet army pushed into Germany, the expectation was that his next symphony would be patriotic, with a dedication to Stalin. But Shostakovich could not bring himself to do so and instead he produced his 9th Symphony, a playful, uplifting work that was the polar opposite of expectations.

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Published by The Journal of Music on 23 May 2022

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