Martha Argerich Festival

For a whole week, the Symphoniker Hamburg devotes itself to exquisite chamber music, and the orchestra has invited a number of renowned guests to join it. In tonight’s programme, the audience has another chance to hear Martha Argerich at the keyboard. In a time of great social turbulence, Sergei Prokofiev retreated to a rural estate, where he wrote a loving and respectful parody of Joseph Haydn in 1917, his »Symphonie classique«. The trio by Shostakovich is elegiac in tone; he wrote it to overcome two traumas: the death of a close friend, and his sorrowful mood in 1944, when war had been raging for over five years. The duo by Zoltán Kodály is unusual in character: the composer wrote the fresh and airy piece in 1914, inspired by the sight of the Alps. Rachmaninov, on the other hand, was feeling seriously homesick in his American exile in 1940 when he wrote his very last work, »Symphonic Dances«, a score as defiant as it is filled with yearning.