CANCELLED: NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester / Steven Isserlis / Juraj Valčuha

Cello fans have had to wait a long time for this: Steven Isserlis, one of the world’s most sought-after cello virtuosi, returns to the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra to play the Cello Concerto No. 2 by Dmitri Kabalevsky, whose music used to be performed much more often in the Soviet Union than it is today. Unjustly so, as this dramatic and emotionally gripping score from 1964 shows.

Conductor Juraj Valčuha, a popular guest of several seasons’ standing in Hamburg, frames the Kabalevsky with two other exciting works. The evening comes to an end with Rachmaninov’s third and final symphony – a wonderfully nostalgic pièce de résistance from the Late Romantic era. »Music should represent all the composer’s experiences«, thus Rachmaninov himself. »Time may change musical techniques, but it can never change music’s mission.«

This also applies, and very much so, to a composition that is among the many premieres given by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in its 75-year history: with György Ligeti’s »Apparitions«, the orchestra appeared under the baton of Ernest Bour at the 34th World Music Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Cologne in 1960. And the incredibly intense and noisy score immediately provoked a huge scandal.