For three concerts in 12th, 13th and 14th January Dimitri Kitaenko returns to the Konzerthausorchester Berlin whose First Guest Conductor he was from 2012 to 2017. The soloist in Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto will be the 47-year-old Italian Russian violinist Sergei Krylov. Maestro Kitaenko has often cooperated with this Stradivarius and Kreisler prize-winner.
The different movements of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto were composed in Paris, Woronesch and Baku. The premiere took place in Madrid. The work marks a move to a more conventional composing method, to a “new simplicity”, like the composer said, and at the same time a return to the virtuoso concerto of the 19th century. The concerto was commissioned for the French violinist Robert Soetens who had the exclusive performing rights for one year. Soetens played the concerto all over the world: in London, Tunis and Algiers, in Portugal and Morocco as well as in South Africa in 1972 – at the age of 75.
In Berlin, Dimitri Kitaenko is also to conduct Prokofiev’s Suite from the film Lieutenant Kijé (1933) whose main figure is a soldier who does not exist. For his superiors, a fictitious lieutenant is advantageous, since he can blamed for everything what goes wrong … At the end, when he must die for state reasons, an empty coffin is carried to the cemetery.
Tchaikovsky’s Fifth symphony concludes the program. It was written in 1888, almost eleven years after the Fourth Symphony. Bad reviews after the first performance left the composer in doubt, but when the performance in Hamburg went very well, he decided to leave the symphony as it was. Like the entire trilogy of the last symphonies the Fifth is a darkly glowing work of confession, living from the opposition between the search for happiness and the fate.