Radio Philharmonic Orchestra
Dudok Quartet

Programme
Joey Roukens: Strange oscillations from String Quartet No. 4 ‘What remains’
John Adams: Absolute jest
Shostakovich: Fourth symphony

VENUE PROGRAMME NOTE:
String quartet and symphony orchestra meet at Theater aan de Parade. For a once-in-a-lifetime concert experience, the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra is partnering with the celebrated Dudok Quartet Amsterdam. Both orchestra and quartet are known for their love of new music. On the menu is the rarely performed Absolute Jest by American minimalist John Adams. A rollercoaster of a concerto for string quartet and orchestra, which Adams himself described as “a colossal twenty-five-minute Scherzo.

Beethoven’s brilliant late quartets are audibly an endless source of inspiration for arch-seclectician Adams. The Dudok Quartet opens the concert in advance with a movement from one of the finest Dutch string quartets of recent years, What Remains, Joey Roukens’ fourth quartet adventure.

After intermission, led by Russian-British conductor Vasily Petrenko, the orchestra dives into the deeply dramatic, highly personal sound world of Shostakovich. His Fourth Symphony is a true monument to as many as one hundred and thirty orchestral musicians. Despite coercive Stalin and his Communist cronies, Shostakovich created a prodigious body of work. Shostakovich packs all his love and frustrations into this three-movement, symphonic tour-de-force, in which he experiments to his heart’s content, professes his love for Mahler, romps with dance music and does not shy away from grotesque effect. Petrenko knows Shostakovich’s Fourth inside and out, having already conducted the work with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. In the British music press, their recording of the Fourth Symphony received purely four- and five-star reviews.

In collaboration with the NTR Saturday Matinee.