R6 / Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 ⬩ Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra

“My true subject is suffering,” Dmitri Shostakovich once remarked when speaking about his music. These words resonate with particular urgency in his Eighth String Quartet of 1960, from which the Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, later emerged in Rudolf Barshai’s arrangement. The work was written during the composer’s stay in Dresden, a city still marked at the time by the devastation of war. Permeated by Shostakovich’s musical monogram D–E♭–C–B (D–Es–C–H), the music takes on the character of an intimate confession, alternating painful chorales, fragmentary reminiscences of his own works, and dramatic orchestral passages.

The second half of the evening is devoted to one of the most significant works in European music – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor. Completed in 1824, the work crossed the traditional boundaries of the symphonic genre by introducing the human voice in its final movement, setting Schiller’s Ode to Joy. Beethoven creates a monumental musical arc that leads from the dramatic opening through the Scherzo and lyrical Adagio to the Finale, in which orchestra, soloists, and choir unite in a celebration of human fellowship.

Under the baton of conductor Tomáš Hanus – one of the leading Czech conducting personalities of today, who appears regularly on major European operatic and symphonic stages – this extraordinary work will be performed together with the Czech Philharmonic Choir Brno and four distinguished vocal soloists as a great symphonic-choral culmination of the concert season.