Renewal and Celebration

Jac van Steen, conductor

Zoe Beyers, violin

Elgar In The South 21’

Korngold Violin Concerto 24’

Interval

Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 4 42’

Tchaikovsky's most uplifting and exuberant symphony, the Fourth, emerged following a period of profound personal crisis. As a declaration of new-found confidence, hope and optimism, it is almost without equal in the classical canon. Erich Wolfgang Korngold had spent many of his prime years as a a film composer in exile from his native Vienna. At the time he fled to America, he declared he would not write for the concert hall so long as Hitler was in power, and for over a decade, he held firm. At long last, as the world celebrated the end of WW II and a new ear of renewal and hope in Europe, Korngold penned his Violin Concerto, a work that overflows with a decade of melodic riches Korngold had been waiting to share with the world. Elgar, much like his hero Brahms, approached writing a first symphony with a mix of trepidation and anxiety. His first sustained attempt to write one in 1903 produced no symphony, but instead Elgar's greatest tone poem, In the South.